I didn’t enjoy 'The Trouble with Goats and Sheep' (her first book) but this was much better.
A thriller about dementia, which is a clever idea as it creates a new twist on the concept of unreliable witnesses/evidence. Florence is 84 and in a care home and a male resident arrives who she is convinced is not who he says he is. In fact she is convinced that he is dead and (it transpires) that she killed him, or someone she believed was him, many years ago after he had been responsible for the death of Elsie’s sister Beryl. The trouble is that her memory is so unreliable, so she relies on promptings from her childhood friend Elsie, her co resident.
Eventually (and it is a fast paced narrative with fewer longeurs than Ms Tey), after a rather bizarre trip to Whitby, which is quite a common theme in books I read, it transpires that Florence’s memory is roughly right and the villain, about whose villainy one had doubts for much of the book, is arrested. It also transpires cleverly that Elsie had in fact been dead for several years, and their dialogues take place entirely in Florence’s mind, so this is the 3rd thing one learns about Elsie.
Very good.
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