No Wind of Blame by Georgette Heyer

I'm like a junkie with these Georgette Heyer mysteries. I try to stop, but then I pick another one up and want to just keep reading them and reading them. Eventually I'll have read them all, and then I don't know what I'll do.

Actually, I can just keep rereading one of them, since they're all pretty much identical. Heyer found a formula that worked and kept with it. In this one, the despicable Wally Carter is shot dead and everyone has a motive but no opportunity to have killed him.

Of course the murder takes place at a country estate, and the characters are pure Heyer: the rich wife who used to be on the stage, her frivolous nineteen-year-old daughter, Wally's sensible cousin Mary, a Russian prince who may be a fake and who's certainly only interested in the rich wife, the local farmer who loves the rich wife and despises the husband, the husband's ne'er-do-well friend, the local barrister's son, the local doctor, etc. As always, the real fun of a Heyer mystery isn't so much the mystery (although that's particularly good in this one, with a clever plot twist--I didn't guess the murderer) as the zippy, slang-filled conversation. I could listen to Heyer's characters talk all day long.

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