A Generation of Vipers: An absolutely addictive and page-turning British cozy mystery (A Dr Nell Ward Mystery Book 4)

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The first novel doubled the circulation of The Blue Book Magazine when it was serialized, and Paramount Pictures promptly bought the movie rights to both books, initially planning to have Cecil B. There's more than a whiff of truth to some of that, but Wylie wasn't content to let truth lie unmolested. I was reading while sipping my cappuccino, after my swim at our local Lido, I carried on reading with my lunch (home-made kedgeree in case you are interested, though I am sure you are not) and then kept going until I had finished it by about 4pm.

I’m not intimately familiar with the Shakespeare of the Week, namely Troilus and Cressida, so I’m not entirely sure how Troilus and Cressida’s story is aligned with David Connelly (Toby Stephens! For a few years after the publication of Vipers, Wylie became everybody’s go-to source when it came to diagnosing the country’s ills. Once it’s laid out, the menu of potential suspects reads like an ethics violations most-wanted list: a real estate developer, the founder of an Internet gossip site, the head of a computer dating service, a journalist, an arrogant student. The mere idea that someone’s malicious behavior led to the professor’s suicide infuriates Lewis, but it doesn’t take him long to find enough evidence to indicate she might have been murdered.The suspects that Lewis and Hathaway uncover during the course of their investigation weave into a tangled web of red herrings and venomous grudges worthy of one of Shakespeare's plays.

It would be difficult to introduce this book without a least a passing on word about its late author, Philip Wylie (1902-1971). As a general book for people, this book is interesting in not only its social commentary but also for the period in which that social commentary was made, and how little things have changed. Hi, watching lots of Lewis episodes on DVDs in Australia, during the COVID pandemic (fortunately local library had a stack of DVDs of Lewis, Endeavour to make the lockdown in Victoria Australia tolerable).Phil was horrified by some kinds of women who were particularly selfish and demanding, especially one of my Aunts, Lamby, who married Phil’s brother Max and made his life miserable.