Rating: 2.875* of fiveThe Book Report: Mathilda Gillespie reminds me of my female relatives: Argumentative, judgmental, unforgiving, grudge-holding, snobbish...is it any wonder Mathilda turns up very, very dead? She's so dead, in fact, that no one with a grain of sense could mistake her overkilling for anything but murder. Her daughter and granddaughter, lucky recipients of Mathilda's viciousness all their lives, are logically suspected of doing the old bat in so as to inherit her dragon's hoard...but they don't, the doc who has (inexplicably) kept her alive has scarfed the lot. What about her as public-spirited citizen, I mean murderer? But wait! What about Mathilda's ex-lover, the man next door? Or his wife? For good measure, the much-richer-now doc has an artist husband who, appalling as it seems, verifiably painted the gorgon starkers, and is evasive about what else the two might've got themselves up to.But wait, there's more! We're treated to Mathilda's inner monologue, via her missing diaries, where she's revealed to have been...what else...A Victim Of Abuse. Oh poor lambie, dreadfully abused, now heaping it on her “nearest and dearest” and blahblahblah with quotes from Shakespeare and a whole lot of hand-wringing and then the murderer is discovered, and mercifully the agony ends. My Review: Woman as victim. Standard stuff. Mildly enlivened by the fact that she's not a Saint Who Has Risen Above, but basically another woeful longface tale about how awful it is to be a woman.Amen. Makes me extra-special glad I'm not one.
