Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, together again, hooray! Harriet Vane has gone off for a vacation in a watering-place (watering-place. Brits are so weird.), and she happens upon a dead body, all throat-cut and bloody. The corpse is dancer Paul Alexis, who is engaged (slightly sordidly) to an extremely rich older woman called Mrs. Weldon, and appears to have been part of a strange Bolshevik type plot. All of the possible suspects have unbreakable alibis. Harriet will still not marry Peter, but he carries on badgering her to marry him anyway.
I am mildly bothered by Peter’s continual badgering of Harriet to marry him even though she says no, no, no.
I love Peter and Harriet. If I had not already put my book upstairs, I would excerpt a brief bit of it where Harriet and Peter are out merrily detecting. The only thing is, I wasn’t in the mood for Have His Carcase at all. I was totally in the mood for Strong Poison, and I guess I just assumed I was in the mood for Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night and even Busman’s Honeymoon. Turns out, not a bit of it! I got tired of Have His Carcase, but I know I love it so I didn’t stop reading it, and when I got done, I still didn’t feel satisfied. Just not in the mood.
But it’s wonderful though. If you haven’t read it, don’t take my cranky mood to mean that you shouldn’t read it straight away after rereading Strong Poison. Just don’t assume that you should always, always read all the sequels to a book for which you are in the mood, because sometimes you are only in the mood to read the original book itself. I think I am tired of mysteries for now. I’m going to read something totally different that isn’t Gaudy Night or Busman’s Honeymoon or that other Peter Wimsey mystery I got out of the library.