Genre: Mystery
Hardcover; Trade Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9789997528124; 9780881501346
Farrago Publishing
200 Pages
Various Prices Amazon
Originally Published in 1964
⭐⭐
Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover is the most idle and avaricious hero in all of crime fiction. Why should he even be bothered to solve the case?
For its own very good reasons, Scotland Yard sends Dover off to remote Creedshire to investigate the disappearance of a young housemaid, Juliet Rugg.
Though there's every cause to assume that she has been murdered -- she gave her favours freely and may even have stopped to a bit of blackmail -- no body is to be found. Weighing in at sixteen stone, she couldn't be hard to overlook.
But where is she? And why should Dover, of all people, be called upon to find her? Or, for that matter, even bother to solve the damned case?
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Wilfred Dover doesn't want to investigate a missing servant girl in Creedshire. After hearing that the girl was a slut, he at first believes that she's just run off with her latest boyfriend. But the fact that she weighs sixteen stone makes a difference - no one that large could hide for very long.
Once he's convinced - with the help of his Detective Sergeant MacGregor - that something has truly happened to her, he's also convinced that someone in the upper class of people living on an estate (converted into single homes now) had something to do with it. It's his job to find out what that is, even if he has to get up once in a while to do so...
Having loved Colin Watson's series, I was hoping that this series would be similar, but I was heavily disappointed. Dover comes off as lazy, overweight, irritable, intolerant of others, and badgers everyone about everything. He takes his sergeant's theories as his own and when his ideas don't pan out, he insists they were his sergeant's. I think this is meant to be funny, but it's not. Also, every character (except the sergeant) in the book is unlikable. From the elderly man to the traveling salesman. Not a one of them seem to have anything that makes one feel sorry for them.
When the ending comes and the murderer is revealed, it's rather unsatisfying. You have no reason at all for the girl to be murdered, in my opinion. This should have been fleshed out more, instead of leaving the reader hanging. Sorry, but I'm not interested in reading any more in this series. Do yourself a favor and pick up Mr. Watson's excellent DI series.
https://www.amazon.com/Dover-One-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B07XX255JK/ref=
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3206315191
More on Joyce Porter's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/p/joyce-porter/
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