Author – Josephine Tey
Genre – Detective, Crime, History
Source - Kindle
Rating - 5
Read - January 2016
What do you do when you find that a book you have not heard about at all is in the top (or nearabouts) in all of the lists of greatest detective / mystery books of all-time? You read it, of course.
So I did.
The basic premise is fairly straightforward - Alan Grant, of the Scotland Yard, has had a broken leg. While recuperating, he is bored with the same old people, the same old food, the same old books et al. So he immerses himself in a historical mystery, of the 'Princes in the Tower' - and Richard III. Grant is not a historian by any stretch of the imagination - but he educated himself of the case, progressing from school books to quasi-historical tales, to proper historic tomes - and in the meantime, becomes friendly with a researcher, who does a good bit of the heavy lifting in terms of fact-checking. And the mystery unfolds.
It's nothing like anything I have read earlier. Thoroughly loved it. Completely worthy of all the adulation.
And thank God for those best-of lists.
