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Dec. 15th, 2021 10:31 pmYesterday ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux wrote up Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse: 'I'd picked it up expecting a fairly straightforward murder mystery and found myself reading a convoluted gothic thriller instead.' Obviously at that point I already knew I was going to read it, but I didn't actually expect to read it immediately. However, today I forgot to bring the book I am currently reading to work and had to search for an emergency read on hoopla, and Cat and Mouse was there for me! So it goes.
The heroine of Cat and Mouse is Katinka Jones, a journalist-turned-agony-aunt writing under the name Miss Friendly-wise who, along with her friend Miss Let's-be-Lovely, has been receiving a series of dramatically Gothic letters from a young woman named Aminta devastatingly in love with her much-older guardian somewhere on an isolated mountain in Wales. The last letter they've received explains that Aminta has finally triumphed in love and she and the guardian, Carlyon, are going to be married.
Katinka frankly finds the Aminta letters a little boring, but her holiday break in Wales is even more boring, so on a lark she decides to go see if she can drop in the Carlyons to say hello. However, when she tracks down Aminta's address, she finds only the devastatingly attractive Carlyon and his two servants, all of whom state firmly that Carlyon has never had a wife nor a ward and they don't know anybody named Aminta. But! Upon arrival, Katinka saw an Aminta letter lying in the outgoing mailbox! So she knows that SOMEONE is LYING!
At this point I very much wanted Katinka to call home and enlist the help of Miss Let's-be-Lovely, because 'two agony aunts team up to crack the case of their weirdest correspondent' is a plot so good I really want to steal it. Instead, Katinka decides to fake break her ankle so she can stay overnight and investigate more, in part because she has fallen in love with Carlyon more or less on sight and in part because she's extremely suspicious of Carlyon's other guest, Mr. Chucky, who explains that he is a police officer with such air quotes vibes that Katinka becomes sure he is a muckraking journo attempting to investigate some kind of dramatic event at the Carlyon household.
( Spoilers are endowed with the dangerous gift of being able to look sad )
troisoiseaux wrote up Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse: 'I'd picked it up expecting a fairly straightforward murder mystery and found myself reading a convoluted gothic thriller instead.' Obviously at that point I already knew I was going to read it, but I didn't actually expect to read it immediately. However, today I forgot to bring the book I am currently reading to work and had to search for an emergency read on hoopla, and Cat and Mouse was there for me! So it goes.The heroine of Cat and Mouse is Katinka Jones, a journalist-turned-agony-aunt writing under the name Miss Friendly-wise who, along with her friend Miss Let's-be-Lovely, has been receiving a series of dramatically Gothic letters from a young woman named Aminta devastatingly in love with her much-older guardian somewhere on an isolated mountain in Wales. The last letter they've received explains that Aminta has finally triumphed in love and she and the guardian, Carlyon, are going to be married.
Katinka frankly finds the Aminta letters a little boring, but her holiday break in Wales is even more boring, so on a lark she decides to go see if she can drop in the Carlyons to say hello. However, when she tracks down Aminta's address, she finds only the devastatingly attractive Carlyon and his two servants, all of whom state firmly that Carlyon has never had a wife nor a ward and they don't know anybody named Aminta. But! Upon arrival, Katinka saw an Aminta letter lying in the outgoing mailbox! So she knows that SOMEONE is LYING!
At this point I very much wanted Katinka to call home and enlist the help of Miss Let's-be-Lovely, because 'two agony aunts team up to crack the case of their weirdest correspondent' is a plot so good I really want to steal it. Instead, Katinka decides to fake break her ankle so she can stay overnight and investigate more, in part because she has fallen in love with Carlyon more or less on sight and in part because she's extremely suspicious of Carlyon's other guest, Mr. Chucky, who explains that he is a police officer with such air quotes vibes that Katinka becomes sure he is a muckraking journo attempting to investigate some kind of dramatic event at the Carlyon household.
( Spoilers are endowed with the dangerous gift of being able to look sad )
