Give the Devil His Due - Gentill
Audio performance by Rupert Degas
4 stars

Rowland Sinclair has two great loves; Edna Higgins and his yellow Mercedes. Both are in deadly peril in the course of this mystery. Rowland has been invited to participate in a benefit pro/am car race. He is placed on a team with the already famous driver, Joan Richmond and the soon to be famous actor, Errol Flynn. Well known historical figures are a given in this series. Errol Flynn was a fun,swashbuckling, comedic addition to this book.

There are political tensions in this book as in the others, but they take a back seat to the car race and the underworld thugs who are making book on the results. There were more car racing details than I needed, but I enjoyed the interactions of the continuing characters. Rowland and his three friends are all in danger at some point in this book. Narrow escapes and multiple suspects abound. It was a very bumpy ride but worth it in the end. ( )

1934, Sydney. Artist and wealthy gentleman, Rowland Sinclair has agreed to enter a motor car race. A race on a track, the Maroubra Speedway, whch is famous for the number of people killed while racing.
Soon the bodies appear, meanwhile Rowland wants to expose to the country the evils of the Hitler movement. Trouble also comes the way of Rowland and his friends from other sources.
An enjoyable slow-paced mystery, a well-written story with its cast of well-drawn characters.
A NetGalley Book
( )

Give the Devil His Due is the seventh in the Rowland Sinclair mystery series, featuring the privileged youngest son of a wealthy Australian family who, much to his elder brother’s consternation, is a Bohemian artist sharing his home with a motley collection of artists. Or at least, his brother would think them motley. In this book, Rowly is preparing for a big charity race for the Red Cross on an infamously dangerous track believed to be cursed. Rowly is a bit too hospitable to a reporter assigned to interview him for pre-race publicity and the reporter, Crispin White, get a bit drunk so Milt, one of Rowly’s friends, drives him home. When the reporter is found dead the next morning, the police zero in on Milt as the prime suspect, not really looking elsewhere.

But there are many more complications than that. Clyde, another housemate, loses the woman he loves to a man chosen by her family who misunderstand his intentions badly. Someone is trying to kill Rowly, but is it the bookies trying to fix the race, the somewhat madcap and thoroughly macabre young artist and reporter who replaced the murdered reporter on his story, the reporter’s murderer, or one of the fascists whose growing political power in Australia leads Rowly to do all he can to speak up for democracy.

I love the characters in the Rowland Sinclair series and it makes me happy to catch up on them in each new book in the series. Give the Devil His Due benefits from a good plot that strewn with red herrings while remaining fair. One of the things I enjoy about Sulari Gentill’s books is how seamlessly the historical and the fictional are interwoven. This is one of the great strengths.

Sometimes great strenghts also are weaknesses. Gentill begins each chapter with stories from newspaper archives that somehow connect to the chapter. I often find myself skipping them. Some are very apt and I read them and then others are just beside the point or illustrative of that era, such as an article about the benefits of smoking. The ones that fit the story, that include the historical characters and such, those I enjoy. Those that are beside the point, I just shrug and move on. I am not sure every chapter needs something from the archives, especially when they are more than a paragraph or two in length.

Nonetheless, having given myself permission to skip the interstitial excerpts that don’t interest me, I found the book enjoyable and a very good mystery.

I received an e-gallely of Give the Devil His Due from the publisher through NetGalley

Give the Devil His Due at Poisoned Pen Press
Sulari Gentill author site
Reviews of others in the series
A Decline in Prophets
Paving the New Road
A Murder Unmentioned

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/08/9781464207037/ ( )

Car races, murder, and an art exhibition! Another fabulous Rowland Sinclair read!

Sydney, Australia 1934. Rowland Sinclair, the accidental gentleman sleuth is continuing to be the bane of his powerful brother Wilfrid's life, and hopelessly in love with his sometime life model and free spirited sculptress Edna Higgins. I'm hopelessly enamored with Rowly and the gang!
Rowly's returned to the family's Sydney home Woodlands House in the salubrious suburb of Woollahra, with his artistic bohemian friends, poet Milton (Elias Isaacs), a card carrying communist, who quotes others works as though they were his own, landscape painter Clyde Watson Jones, and the beautiful inside and out, Ed (Edna). Rowly's mother Elizabeth, suffering from dementia, is in residence and still calls him by his deceased brother's name, Aubrey. She's a wonderful addition to the menagerie.
Rowley is to race his yellow Mercedes roadster in a charity event for the Australian Red Cross at the jinxed Maroubra speedway.
But in the meantime a reporter, Crispin White, is murdered in the Magdalene’s House of the Macabre, a horror waxworks, after having dinner at Woodlands. Milton comes under suspicion and Rowley and gang must do all they can to prove his innocence.
Throw into the mix Clyde's ex fiancé's Italian family who decide to take action against him and things become very lively.
The fascists are still beguiling the Australian public into seeing them as concerned citizens with the best interests of the country at heart. The conservatives are still trying to handle them.
Psychologically effected, but recovering from his dreadful time in Berlin, Rowley decides to launch an exhibition of his paintings showing the Nazi's up for who they really are.
Rowley is a character I just keep falling in love with. Charming, boyish, principled, avant garde, a talented artist, laconic, sincere and amusing. His handling of his mother is loving and delightful.
Really Gentill's novels are a fabulous trip through Australian political and social history in the 1930's, exposing not just the prejudices of the time, the effects of the Depression, but the sleazy underbelly of the criminal world. We're also treated to the artistic historical developments of the times, and are given an inkling of thoughts and ideas of this island community during this era.
The luminaries we continue to meet are priceless. Kenneth Slessor, a poet whose work I've always admired, Norman Lindsay, Errol Flynn, and Arthur Stace, the man who for thirty years wrote Eternity in fine copperplate all over Sydney.
I must say how pleased I am to have had an ARC of this book from the publishers. Without this I wouldn't have come across Gentill's fabulous Sinclair series. I have enthusiastically taken to reading my way through the series prior to this publication and am enjoying every moment.

A Poisoned Pen Press ARC via NetGalley ( )