tags: mystery, ugly
goose🥚
From Goodreads
What begins as a ploy to claim an inheritance ends with the impostor's life hanging in the balance. In this tale of mystery and suspense, a stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family's sizable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick's mannerisms, appearance, and every significant detail of Patrick's early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that jeopardize the impostor's plan and his life. Culminating in a final terrible moment when all is revealed, Brat Farrar is a precarious adventure that grips the reader early and firmly and then holds on until the explosive conclusion.
This is the worst mystery novel written by Josephine Tey and the worst I have read this year. She made an impostor, criminal, and thief an honorable character and made a 13 year boy murder his twin brother right after their parents were killed. Just because he didn't like his brother. No other explanation and not believable at all. This was an awful read.
Tey had a habit of telling instead of showing. Throughout the short novel, now 21 year old adult Simon, never showed that he is an evil Cain. It was all in the mind of the impostor who was always sure it was Simon, at age 13 who killed his brother, without explaining why he thought so. Just a hunch. What?? Simon confessed to him when got drunk and justified the impostor's suspicion.
The author never showed any sympathy for the fictional family who lost the parents at the same time, just told what happened., as though in real life she abhored the landed gentry. Anyway, the parents left 13 year old twin brothers Patrick and Simon, 11 year old Eleanor, and 1 year old twin babies, Ruth and Jane. I was so annoyed when out of the blue, the impostor Patrick thought that 9 year old Ruth probably has never been spanked. She hadn't done nor showed anything to make an adult spank her. She was a well behaved and spoken young girl. That's lazy crazy writing. Tey was not a talented writer or she was absolutely bonkers when she wrote this book.
Not recommended.
