Mark Aldridge

James book, Taste for Death, there's so many characters that you're slowly introduced to and that you have to really work out their relationship and you don't know which ones are going to be important and which ones aren't.

And for me, there's a slight sense there that if...

Agatha or Mary Westmacott had expanded this even further, I feel like we would have got more subplots that wouldn't have actually had any impact on what John Gabriel and Hugh Norrie's and Isabella's story is.

That was always going to be the same.

And I always quite enjoy it when I read a book, and I'm never quite sure what the main plot is.

Like, you know when there's no one thing that's going to get you to the end.

So yeah, they were just instinctively the things I thought of.

So I thought that there's a really strong sense that she understands the power of instinct.

I think we've seen that in other books as well, but particularly here.

And it made me think a bit about the thing that we rarely discuss, which is her disappearance, which clearly was very driven by instinct because it wasn't something she made up.

huge rational choice about and I wondered how much we can see that in all three main characters but especially Gabriel and Isabella in this one that they are driven to do what they do without necessarily being able to explain it and certainly without being able to justify it even really so that's that was my main thought somebody who understood instinct and how powerful that can be what about you?

Well, there is actually, unusually, a review of this book that does start to make a connection between different Westmacott titles.

So, The Evening Star, which is Washington, D.C.

newspaper.

The reviewer said that, like Absent in the Spring, Mary Westmacott's previous novel, The Rose and the Yew Tree, has a quality of quiet distinction.

It is as fine as needlepoint, with each detail carefully stitched to give colour and outline to the whole pattern.

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