Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
Nicola Upson again engages her fictionalised “Josephine Tey” in another evocative period adventure. The narrative offers a thought provoking insight into how the protection of a nation’s culture in wartime can lead to uncovering a hidden mystery protected by community secrets.
It is 1941, Great Britain is at war with Nazi Germany, so when the Luftwaffe start their aerial bombing of the nation’s capital and major cities, the paintings of the National Gallery have to be evacuated to a place of safety.
The recently married Detective Inspector Archibald ‘Archie’ Penrose has to forgo his honeymoon, as he’s tasked to oversee the relocation of the nation’s most treasured art. Originally stored in Penrhyn Castle, officials at the National Gallery found themselves clashing with the demands of Lord Penrhyn, so the paintings were again on the move, this time to an abandoned slate mine in Wales. Accompanying the Detective are Josephine Tey and her partner Marta Fox who is recording the relocation for the Crown Film Unit. Problems arise when the body of woman is unearthed [in an unmarked grave] inside the mine following a rock-fall. Despite DCI Penrose’s natural instinct to investigate, his work in saving the Nation’s most precious paintings from the National Gallery [annoyingly] takes precedence.
The novel then takes a swerve to the Blanenau Ffestiniog Guest House, where Josephine Tey interrupts her holiday to assist her friend Archie Penrose, taking over the investigation of the mysterious body unearthed in the slate mine. Nearby, the playwright Noel Coward works on Blithe Spirit in the company of actress Margret Rutherford. It’s amusing that Rutherford is perhaps best remembered as Agatha Christie’s amateur detective Miss Marple. She is looking to play a medium, a clairvoyant in Coward’s play, but is wavering. As Tey investigates the identity and circumstances of the woman’s body, the local community close ranks. There are links to a local school, though the revelations are cloaked by the erosion of time and complicity of a four decades secret.
An intriguing historical mystery novel that is a dark cozy, one written for a winter evening spent tucked up in bed with a mug of cocoa.
Though The Voices of the Dead is the author’s twelfth mystery to feature the fictionalised Josephine Tey, there is no requirement for the reader to have read the preceding books, or even the novels of Josephine Tey. However, that being said, this latest novel by Nicola Upson may well entice readers unfamiliar with the work of Josephine Tey to explore this influential [and far from forgotten] crime writer, perhaps best remembered for her novel The Daughter of Time.
