Witness at large

This was a quick, short read. I read it over the course of one afternoon/evening. In many ways, it's typical Mignon G Eberhart (MGE) - a young woman discovers darkness at the heart of her family and close friends, and learns that she really doesn't know these people closest to her as well as she thought. The protaganist is in many ways an outsider, who finds herself – at least in her own eyes – increasingly isolated as time goes on. MGE has a tendency to be a little predictable, so it’s best not to read too many of her novels close together. However, this is one of the more entertaining ones.

The narrator is "Sister", a name she goes by until the very end of the book. I think this nickname is a little disconcerting to some readers, but I'm a southerner and it's quite common around here, especially among older people. My father's older sister was referred to as "Sister" because she was the oldest. Anyway, MGE's Sister has grown up in the Esseven household and now works for the Esseven publishing company. The head of the family is known as "the Sahib" (this family is found of nicknames!), a charming, manipulative, autocratic rascal. He also officially adopted two young relatives, Tom and Boyd, who also work in the family business. Tom is engaged to Alice and Boyd is married to Mildred. The Sahib is elderly now, though decidedly still very sharp and cunning as he always was.

Mildred - arrogant, greedy, and extremely obnoxious to everyone around her - is forcing her husband to sell his half of the Esseven stocks. However, they are opposed by the rest of the family, especially the Sahib. Mildred is a bully who is accustomed to get her way by abusing everyone around her. Not surprisingly, she turns up dead - but is it murder?

"The light which always shone at night from the sea side of the boathouse was dimmed by the fog, but I saw Tom. He was leaning over, crouched down above the water. The fog was thick, but I saw a bare white leg flop over the pier and then flop down into the black water again. I knew it was Mildred."

The problem is - what does Sister really know? What did she actually see?

Sister can get annoying at times – I frequently wanted to just shake her and tell her, “Stop being an idiot!” However, that’s a gothic for you. She is smarter than a lot of gothic heroines and can be very determined, even to the point of manipulating Tom into doing something he doesn’t want to do. Her judgment of people can be quite shrewd at times. For example, her amusing reaction to George Bronson:

"So of course I came downstairs and said how do you do and wondered what zoo he had escaped from and how, which was odd, for he was remarkably polite and pink and clean and bald. Flashing very large white teeth which rather suggested that he had eaten his keeper, he said that he didn’t wish to intrude but that he had seen the sheriff’s boat tied at the pier and wanted to talk to him.”

That made me laugh. If Sister actually said half the things she thought, she would shock her family and friends, who seriously underestimate her. Unfortunately, Sister isn’t the one who catches the killer – though the killer almost catches her. It’s still a fun read, though, and a good way to pass a rainy day (which we’ve been having a lot of lately).