I enjoy a book which takes me somewhere else and reinforces that setting with every character, conversation and incident. The Long Long Afternoon took me to 1950's California, both the pristine suburbs and a contrasting deprived quarter of Los Angeles. It was quite shocking to find pretty much the same type of colour discrimination as shown in novels set in the Bible Belt of the USA, such as Kathryn Stockett's The Help.
This is a good dramatic mystery, complete with a middle-aged white male cop relocated from Brooklyn and a young amateur sleuth whose previous role was as a home help. You'll need to keep your wits about you to solve this one!
inga Vesper's writing is good, very enjoyable. I came across just the occasional sentence which knocked me out of the story by means of a word which seemed to come straight from the writer rather than the mind of the character. The odd apparent anachronism I stumbled over turned out, every time, to be due to my own ignorance; who knew frozen peas were a common-place convenience food in a middle income home in 1959?
This is a good dramatic mystery, complete with a middle-aged white male cop relocated from Brooklyn and a young amateur sleuth whose previous role was as a home help. You'll need to keep your wits about you to solve this one!
inga Vesper's writing is good, very enjoyable. I came across just the occasional sentence which knocked me out of the story by means of a word which seemed to come straight from the writer rather than the mind of the character. The odd apparent anachronism I stumbled over turned out, every time, to be due to my own ignorance; who knew frozen peas were a common-place convenience food in a middle income home in 1959?