Review of 'Dead Mans Chest A Phryne Fisher Mystery' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The Phryne Fisher novels are very well written mystery novels set in 1920s Australia.
In this novel Phryne takes a holiday. Yes, yet another one, she is titled and rich and can afford as many holidays as she wants I guess. This time she and her family visit idyllic seaside resort Queenscliff, which we already enountered briefly once before.
The main plot of the novel is her daughter Ruth's discovery of a sophisticated cookbook among the books in the house they stay in, and her continuous improvement into someone who can run a kitchen on her own, dealing with local traders and staff, creating interesting new dishes, and becoming more versed in culinary things.
Of course there is also the thing about the missing housekeepers that disappeared just before they arrived, someone else who raided the food supplies afterwards, someone clipping young girls' pigtails (and at one point a girl's …
The Phryne Fisher novels are very well written mystery novels set in 1920s Australia.
In this novel Phryne takes a holiday. Yes, yet another one, she is titled and rich and can afford as many holidays as she wants I guess. This time she and her family visit idyllic seaside resort Queenscliff, which we already enountered briefly once before.
The main plot of the novel is her daughter Ruth's discovery of a sophisticated cookbook among the books in the house they stay in, and her continuous improvement into someone who can run a kitchen on her own, dealing with local traders and staff, creating interesting new dishes, and becoming more versed in culinary things.
Of course there is also the thing about the missing housekeepers that disappeared just before they arrived, someone else who raided the food supplies afterwards, someone clipping young girls' pigtails (and at one point a girl's throat), a rum smuggling operation, a film crew filming something about pirates close by, surrealists living in the next house, the (suspicious?) death of another neighbour, a crew of three well-off boys running wild, and the legend of a pirate treasure hidden somewhere in the area.
Did I forget something? Maybe. Most likely.
The amount of different plots and red herrings this novel throws at it's reader is dazzling. Ruth's cooking aspirations might have been planned as a bit of character development, but they end up making up the only consistent plot one can follow. The rest of the plot meanders through holidaying and crime investigation with barely any hint of what is going on in any given moment. Some of the mysteries have less description than the few scenes when Phryne takes a morning swim.
This overabundance of plotlines even is lampshaded, when Phryne realizes that the one possible murder they might have encountered now was unsolvable because she forgot to look at the evidence she had, on account of all the other things going on.
Far from the trinkling nothingness of its predecessor "Murder in the Dark" this novel has nearly too many plotlines to follow, although at least the writing and the characterization of the characters is so well done that even bit characters seem real. It's not really a mystery book, more a feel-good holiday novel.
