Unnatural Death, by Dorothy Sayers

Mystery novels thrive on novelty, on how to murder the victim and hide the perpetrator in new and previously unused ways, and this was especially true in the Golden Age of the whodunnit. Peter Wimsey’s career began whimsically enough in Whose Body? with a mysterious body in a bathtub. He investigates a country house mystery that perhaps isn’t really a country house mystery in Clouds of Witness. But Lord Peter has to truly extend himself in his third outing, Unnatural Death, because it’s not clear for much of the book whether a murder has been committed at all.

Lord Peter and his friend, Police Inspector Parker, have a drink with a young doctor who lost his practice in a country town for insisting on an autopsy in the case of the death of an aged woman of the town. Nothing was found; and as he was thought to have accused the woman’s niece of murder, he was shunned until he gave up and left. The tale interests Lord Peter, and he decides to investigate in his usual nosy upperclass fashion. And it really does begin to look like murder: there is motive, and there is opportunity, and things just don’t smell right…except that all the indications are that the old woman died a natural death.

And then the bodies start piling up….

I have the happy capability of not remembering plots of mystery novels all that well, usually including the identity of the guilty party; in this case, though, the murder method was sufficiently unique that I remembered it about halfway through; and after that it was just all fun watching it play out: a good outing, and worthy of its predecessors, with sufficient twists, turns, and red herrings to make it interesting. Recommended.