Pretty funny mystery, on par with the first in the series (although I agree Julia makes a more interesting voice than Selena). Only a few jokes are laugh out loud funny but it consistently kept a smile on my face - as others have said, it's pretty dry humour but I like that. Sometimes it goes into tangents about the English legal system or Homer or cricket but it's never too hard to follow and for me that's part of the charm. Also continues the same refreshing attitude to sex and sexuality as in the first book - there's no excessive talk about sex or anything but it comes up and it's handled breezily and funnily and with an open mind. The mystery itself is cool and the solution is hinted at pretty well throughout the book (although only in retrospect for me, haha - it's not an obvious answer). The writing is really fun and enjoyable and the interactions between the main characters are really great - makes a change from some of the "blank slate" type stuff. Not a literary classic exactly but still one of the best mysteries I've ever read. Great series. ( )

It seemed the perfect way to avoid three million in taxes on a five-million-pound estate: change the trust arrangement. Everyone in the family agreed to support the heiress, ravishing raven-haired Camilla Galloway, in her court petition - except dreary cousin Deirdre, who suddenly demanded a small fortune for her signature. Then Deirdre has a terrible accident. That was when the young London barristers handling the trust -Cantrip, Selena, Timothy, Ragwort, and Julia- summoned their Oxford friend Professor Hilary Tamar to Lincoln's Inn. Julia thinks it's murder. Hilary demurs. Why didn't the heiress die? But when the accidents escalate and they learn of the naked lunch at Uncle Rupert's, Hilary the Scholar remarks on the most perilous quest of all: the truth...

All of the members of 62 New Square are representing individuals of one family with respect to changing the family’s trust arrangement, this needing to be done to avoid paying some 3 million pounds in taxes on a 5 million pound estate upon the death of the matriarch. But all the parties must agree, and young Deirdre, just turned 18, decides she wants more money than the agreement allowed; shortly after the family agrees to her request, she accidentally falls to her death. If further deaths are to be prevented, Professor Hilary Tamar must leap ahead of a possible killer’s mind…. This is the second of four novels featuring the amateur sleuth Hilary Tamar, written mostly in the 1980s (the final book was published in 2000) and reissued some 10 years later, when I discovered them. One delightful aspect of the series is that we never know if Hilary is a man or a woman, which leads to an awareness of how little that matters. Primarily, though, these books are very funny, definitely in the comedy of manners tradition, with 1980s-specific musings on sex, sexuality and conventional wisdom thrown in. Recommended, but read the first novel (“Thus Was Adonis Murdered”) first in order to get the most out of this second one! ( )

Second of Caudwell's four mysteries involving Professor Tamar and the young barristers of Lincoln's Inn, and maybe not quite as fresh and amusing as the first, but still very enjoyable. A young woman falls from a balcony on Boat Race day in circumstances that make it seem as though there may be a connection with a trust of which she was one of the possible beneficiaries, and the professor becomes involved in another investigation conducted mostly by correspondence. There's some interesting sailing around Corfu, an attempt to locate Nausicaa's laundry-list, and a Corfiot cricket match that owes more than a little to A. G. Macdonell. Also perhaps a little bit more detail on the law of variation of trusts than most of us feel we need to know, a couple of good steamy orgies, and some fascinating information about the study of errors in the transmission of manuscript texts. ( )

Not as engaging as the previous, although with a bunch of well turned phrases and funny situations. ( )