Death in Two Parts

In a note to the reader, Hodge (Bride of Dreams; Unsafe Hands; etc.) states that she began this book in 1950, but only recently finished it. The result is a disjointed two-part narrative that fails to cohere. With its scheming relatives and promised inheritances, part one amounts to an old-fashioned whodunit, whereas part two offers suspense with sentimental overtones. The 1950 Christmas holiday is a gloomy one for Patience Smith, as the Oxford student learns that she's used up her trust fund and is in debt. She travels to Featherstone Hall, where she's to be a paid companion to her manipulative, mean-spirited great aunt. Patience soon learns that the matriarch keeps her unhappy brood tightly tethered by the purse strings. Furthermore, the old woman taunts her children and grandchildren by capriciously changing her will to leave her fortune to Patience. When she dies of an overdose of sleeping pills, the family gangs up to frame Patience for murder. Part one ends abruptly on a cliffhanger, which is never fully explained. Part two picks up 48 years later, with Patience, still bitter and haunted by that Christmas, suddenly finding herself bedeviled by an accusing young waif and by her cousins--one of whom has made an attempt on her life. Characters who reappear in part two don't seem to have evolved logically from their earlier roles. What suspense there is falls flat; the mystery of the old woman's death is revisited in conversation, leading to a conjectural and unsatisfying resolution. (Sept.)