Book Review: Unexpected Night by Elizabeth Daly

Unexpected Night is a 1930s? mystery by Elizabeth Daly that I bought from the Seattle Mystery Bookshop on the recommendation of one of the employees. This rich young heir with a heart condition is found dead by some sea cliffs, but then more murders keep happening. The acting detective Henry Gamadge is trying to figure out why and trying to protect the dead heir's younger sister from harm.

UN is the first Gamadge book, which I assume are about Henry Gamadge solving mysteries even though he specializes in rare books and handwriting. Obviously the rare books thing is what made me decide to buy it, but it is mentioned like once (the handwriting thing is used in the investigation, obviously). The blurb on the back of the book made it sound like we hear more about his rare books expertise, or that the cases he solves had to do with rare books, but no.

While I like to get into the action pretty soon in the book, I kind of felt like I was thrown into the series without any explanation or introduction. It felt like I had picked up a book in the middle of a series and was expected to know who everyone was and what was going on. I kept forgetting who was who even though I read the book over like two days. That said, the mystery was pretty tightly written and kept me guessing. I didn't have any hypotheses about whodunit, like I usually do with mysteries, and the ending was kind of surprising yet plausible.

I'm not sure how I felt about Gamadge as a character. He was almost a bit Gary Stu-ish, as he's so good at everything and everyone likes and follows him and he gets to conduct all these investigations with the police, but he's humble about it. I thought it pretty implausible that some random semi-friend of the victim's like uncle or something would be allowed by the police to investigate a murder, but if I remember correctly, he already knew the police fairly well. I didn't find him that compelling or interesting, and I didn't really like any of the characters. Despite this book being written by a woman, the female characters were just so-so.

I may try to track down the other books in the series from the library. The cover is more appropriate for a romance or a novel of sparkling humor (I could see it on a Jeeves & Wooster book, almost), but it does capture the era fairly well. I think this cover is way better.

Score: 3.8 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid-ish January
From: Seattle Mystery Bookshop
Format: paperback
Status: tentatively holding on, but may give away in the future because I have limited space available