Death of a Dyer

Will Rees and Nate Bowdith were childhood friends in pre-Revolution Maine until they had a falling out during the war that was never patched. Twenty years late, Nate is dead, his son is suspected of murder, and Will has been asked to investigate. The subplot is Will's relationship with his son and his housekeeper, a former Shaker whom he may or may not wish to marry.

Eleanor Kuhns has constructed a great mystery in Death of a Dyer, which kept me turning the pages far more quickly than I'd intended or expected. (Nate was a dyer, which was an actual craft/profession before you could simply walk into the Gap and come out with every shade of the rainbow in every fabric imaginable. But I digress.) I prefer my mysteries truly mysterious, that is to be unable to guess the killer (because it's almost always a killer) before all is revealed in the last pages, and in that sense Death of a Dyer did not disappoint. I was utterly off the mark, although looking back, I shouldn't have been - another hallmark of great mystery writing.

I will say that I was disappointed with the historical aspect of the novel. I chose this in no small part because of the time period and, while ha'pennies and buggies abound, I didn't feel particularly connected to the time period. More disconcerting, I couldn't ever really figure out the duration of the events in the novel - did all of these things happen in a week? A month? Six weeks? Hmph. And finally, I was confused by the choice of Will Rees to investigate the murder - he has been absent from the little town of Dugard, Maine, for so long that he is unable to recognize many of the people he grew up with (he is a traveling weaver), and yet he's been handpicked for this task. It's all a bit baffling really. (Until I learned that Death of  Dyer is part of the Will Rees series - so he's a bit like Hercule Poirot, I gather, without the obsession with "little gray matter.")

If you can move beyond the issues above, as well as the While this is not the greatest mystery I have ever read, (an honor that still belongs to Dame Christie, with Bury Your Dead not too far behind), I do feel it deserves more than the three-and-a-half stars it currently has (out of five) on Amazon.The mystery, as I said in the beginning, is solid, the characters are generally interesting, and the story beyond the mystery is engaging. Four stars (out of five).