I'm accepting it - I'm not a Sayers fan. ( )

I mean, fine mystery with some clever identity play and misleading stuff. How much you enjoy it will depend on how much you enjoy Sayers' style. And bell ringing talk.

I have to say something about the ending In the end, the murder is revealed to be a complete accident, although it's maybe not surprising that leaving a guy in a room of 8 big bells is not exactly conducive to his health. The victim was a murderer and thief who ruined the lives of multiple people - and weirdly didn't even see any profit from it. And before his identity was discovered everyone thought he was dead anyway. So the discovery of the body and Wimsey's identification of him just made everything worse, a fact he muses on a bit. The person with the most responsibility for the death didn't intend to kill him - he was married to the man's wife and had realised that if he was still alive then their marriage was bigamous, and was going to give him money to leave the country to avoid a scandal for the wife. He got struck down by flu before he could carry out his plan and left him in the belfry, which killed him.

And then at the end of the book, when there's no sign there's going to be any charges pressed against him or anything, he dies. He's working on a sluice gate, it bursts with plenty of warning so I don't know why they didn't get off, someone falls in the river, he jumps in after them, both die.

The death feels entirely futile, both from a moral and narrative standpoint. He's left behind a wife and kids, the wife widowed for the 2nd time. He was a labourer and presumably barely left any money for them. He could have left the sluice before it burst. But none of this is gone into. He just dies. It's a bizarrely miserable end where it feels like Wimsey's exertions did nothing but ruin the lives of a working class family. But hey, the daughter of the county squire got extremely rich so everything's fine! Bizarre.

Also the cipher here is pretty ingenious but it's both cracked way too easily and also gone into more detail than most people would be interested in. Have His Carcase had the same problem. ( )

When a disfigured corpse is discovered in a country parish, the local rector pleads with Lord Peter to take on what will become one of his most brilliant and complicated cases.

Wimsey gets stuck in a small village over New Year when his car breaks down, and becomes involved in bell ringing the New Year in. Whilst he's waiting for his car to be fixed, he hears the story of some emeralds being stolen and the devastating effect it has had on some of the local families.

Months later, an extra body is unexpectedly found in a grave, face bashed in, hands cut off and a cause of death undetermined, Wimsey is called back to help find out what happened.

What happens next is a story of imposters, double crosses, bigamy, murder, theft, ciphers and bell ringing. Sometimes the information presented is a little too much, which did make my eyes glaze over occasionally, and is perhaps why it took me so long to finish - I should have been able to finish this much faster than I did. Not my favourite of the Wimsey stories, and this would not stand up (on it's own) against an agatha Christie ( )

I'd heard the phrase "ringing the changes" my whole life but never knew what it meant. The descriptions of the English style of bell ringing in this book are detailed and obsessive; long story short, the tuneless cacophony you hear after weddings in English movies is a deliberate effect that people are working very hard to achieve. So, worth the admission for unlocking a new genre of YouTube videos to watch when you don't have or feel prone to a headache. The mystery is convoluted, and if you sometimes have a hard time remembering who is who in a multi-character mystery, take notes. But the characters are delightful and the language is thrilling, with beautiful descriptions of land and people; no doubt there is also an underlying structure to the book related to bell-ringing. You can sense this is a bit of a time-killer before Harriet Vane comes back on the scene, but it's not wasted time. ( )

This book finds Lord Peter Wimsey in a small country town struggling to solve a crime. It actually shows more of the ponderous work needed by detectives than other Peter Wimsey books. Much of the plot involves the intricacies of bell ringing and drainage canals. Many readers are likely to grow weary of these details but I found them interesting. The book, however, would have been nicely accompanied by a soundtrack. ( )