Elizabeth Ferrars wrote
Enough to Kill a Horse in 1955 and by the time was well established as a mystery writer somewhat in the Agatha Christie vein although most of her novels, including the current one, were stand alone affairs without a starring recurring detective. She was billed as "E.X. Ferrars" in the US because the publisher thought it would sell better. Except for a brief period just before the writing of this current title where she and her husband lived in the US, Ferrars made her home in England most of her life, the latter half in Edinburgh and Oxfordshire.
This new edition is published by Langtail Press of England for Amazon
Kindle and, happily, for under $4. It's also wonderfully formatted, with nary a typo and proper indenting, chapter breaks and paragraph spacing. The only quibble: no "cover". Langtail has been keeping its costs down by supplying generic type-only covers.
Written in the third voice, the narrator tells us of the events and continually eavesdrops into the hidden voices of many of the characters. We don't see the landscape from the point-of-view of a single character but of much of the cast. It's a splendid technique which helps develop each character and their motivations; in a mystery novel, a wonderful place to unleash one red herring after another.
Fanny and Basil live in a small town a couple of hours by train from London. Fanny is a housewife and her world is her home; Basil is a scientist by trade. Also living in the household is Kit, Fanny's half-brother, who helps Fanny run an antique shop in a small room attached to the front of the house. There are next-door neighbours -- Jean and Colin Gregory who are frightfully wealthy (Colin lives off his wife's money) -- and a local pub, with a couple of hotel rooms to let upstairs, which acts as another locale where other neighbours appear. When Kit announces he will not marry the local girl Susan but has proposed to a divorced, young professional woman in London, Fanny decides to throw a welcoming party to meet Laura at Fanny's home. Fanny worries that she is not good enough to face the beautiful and sophisticated Laura and so invites Sir Peter, a retired newspaper publisher, and her longtime best friend Joan, who also lives in London.
So there you are: a large cast of characters (and I've left out the pub owners, more neighbours such as the Mordues, the local doctor and, of course, a police inspector) in an English country setting -- the grist for so many classic whodunit writers like Christie, Marsh, Mitchell and others. Naturally, at the party, someone dies eating Fanny's favourite hors d'oeuvres. Was it an accident? Was it murder? Was the victim the intended victim or was someone else supposed to die? And why? This is not a police procedural: the police inspector has a bit part; it is Fanny and others who are busy "solving" the case and misleading the reader down countless byways. The final working out, occuring in the final pages, cannot fail to surprise.