Margaret Frazer, The Hunter's Tale

[ellarien]

A huntsman and seriously abusive father/husband dies mysteriously in the forest, to no one's dismay. Unfortunately, he manages to leave his widow and heirs in a fairly impossible situation through an unreasonable will, and a neighbor starts to take a suspicious interest in the widow. Somewhere along the line, I forget how exactly, Dame Frevisse the detecting nun gets involved. I wonder if it says something about the construction of the plot that I can, at a few months' remove and after reading a couple more in the same series, neither remember how she got there nor what if anything she accomplishes once there; the family tragedy unfolds regardless, and the dogs are the most interesting characters, on the whole.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I've probably told you this before, but I loved the Sister Frevisse mysteries up through book 8, after which the remaining writer of the duo got to plot everything herself. The books promptly underwent a change in Sister Frevisse's character that was so profound I didn't recognize her as the same character. Obviously, the spiritual half left and the adequate but not terribly inspired half stayed. :(

[ellarien]

You did mention that once before ;) The later ones are much easier to come by, though, and by that time I'd already acquired most of them, so I've been working through them. The first couple, which are in print for some reason, suffered to my mind from having rather thin plots -- so thin that I could spot the murderer half way through -- while the later ones were at least a bit twistier.

I keep a list of the ones I have on my PDA, so that I can keep looking for the missing middle ones; they're stupid-expensive on Amazon, but that doesn't always mean one can't find things lurking in used bookstores now and again.