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Not very good mystery, but interesting
I didn't know about Josephine Tey until I saw the winner of this month. I was pleasantly surprised, as a mystery I'm sorry to say it didn't amount to much, but the way she portrays the protagonist made me want to go on reading just to find out what happened to him.
Also there are the horses! a substantial part of the book and the plot is related to horses. As a non-native speaker it got me going back to the dictionary to look up all the horse related words. It's something I like, that I can learn some jargon of a subject I know very little.
Overall for me, its charm resides more in her descriptions of the life at the horse farm and how Brat finds his way among some questionable moral choices. The mystery elements are not very strong because you can see from the first pages that Simon is "special" and from the first time he meets Brat it's clear he knows for a fact that he's not his brother (how could he know, unless...). Also the family wholeheartedly embraces him so it doesn't feel like his cover will be blown any minute now. The only thing that puzzles me is that maybe I wasn't paying attention to the geography of the place because I have no idea where the quarry is, relative to the cliff or why it was possible for Simon to reach the quarry but not the cliff, but I'm too lazy to re-read that part.
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