Murder on the Ballarat Train
By Kerry Greenwood
Poisoned Pen Press
Hardcover, 160 pages, $24.95
ISBN: 1-59414-422-2
Another slender romp by the first lady of female detectives,
Lady Phryne Fisher. Certainly, the most glamorous of 1920’s Australia. I happen
to think she’s one of the best detectives to arise in a very long time among
the characters of crime fiction While her time on and off the train to Ballarat
my not be her finest hours, Phryne Fisher manages to pull off a very delicious
coup and add to her family in Melbourne.
This is the primary importance of this novel; it explains
the presence in later books of two minor if charming characters, the children
Jane and Ruth. With her faithful Watson at her side in the person of her maid
Dot, the Hon. Ms. Fisher goes off by sedate train to Ballarat for a week of R
& R. They are hardly on their way, settled in for the night in the sleeping
car, when Phryne detects skullduggery. There is poisonous gas about. Does she
scream for the conductor? Of course not. She pulls forth her trusty .32 cal.
Beretta and plugs the glass out of their sleeping compartment window, thereby
rousing officials and neighbors and saving several lives in the process.
Things descend from there. Determining why chloroform is
being foisted on the passengers is interrupted by encounters with a young
escapee from a white slave operation and, back in Melbourne, several excellent encounters
with members of a local rowing team, every one of them apparently an engaging
young man.
It all gets sorted out in the end, of course, under the sure
guiding hand of author Greenwood,
but not without her usual dead-on pot shots at some of the less savory aspects
of our society. Another delightful and thoughtful criminous novel in this
continuing series.
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