Kissing The Gunner's Daughter (1993) - Plot & Excerpts
Another great Inspector Wexford mystery by Ruth Rendell.In this one three people are killed (slaughtered actually) while eating dinner in a great mansion located in a somewhat secluded, private wooded estate. Yes, they are wealthy. One's a famous author; the other two are her husband and daughter. There is one survivor, a granddaughter, shot in the shoulder and who nearly bleeds to death.Wexford, with his sidekick, Burden, and various other police aides, officers, and forensics experts set up camp in the converted stable on the estate and set out working on a case with multiple suspects, lots of confusing and conflicting clues, and as usual in a Rendell mystery, many witnesses who know a little and say a lot, or the opposite. (Never have I seen so many truculent and unwilling witnesses and bystanders as in a Rendell mystery. She even comments on it from time to time as how stubborn, indignant and reluctant most English tend to be. We have our issues in the US, but Rendell comments, and often, how different Americans are from the English in that most Americans are willing to help the authorities when it comes to solving a crime, especially murder. Let's hope it stays that way.) Anyhow, it's like pulling teeth when Wexford asks the most innocuous of questions, starting with: 'Where were you last Tuesday night?' or, 'Did you know the victim?'In this particular case, though, I DID figure out part of who did what to whom and why. On a re-read I think I'd see the 'clues' and leads more clearly. But from the start I thought hmmm, could it be... And I was right! But not about everything, darn it.Anyhow, an excellent choice for a mystery fan. It's got death, blood, conflicting witness statements, subplots that add to the story and one subplot that's there just to torment poor old 'Reg' Wexford.I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Read by.................. Robin BaileyTotal Runtime......... 12 Hours 3 MinsDescription: Investigating the murder of a socialite family, Inspector Wexford is forced to face his own deepest feelings. Called "one of Rendell's darkest and most suble character studies" (SF Chronicle).'Kissing The Gunner's Daughter' is an old Naval expression from the by gone days of sailing ships. Whenever an able bodied seaman violated the Captain's shipboard rules the punishment was cruel and severe. The guilty seaman was bent over a ship's cannon and his legs and hands secured; his blouse was stripped to bare his back to the punishinglashes of the whip or 'Cat-O'-Nine' tails.Bombs, petrol fires, a lot of interesting facts about trees and coppicing, and Wexford works through his mid-life crisis. Significantly longer book than the previous books. 3* From Doon With Death (Inspector Wexford, #1)3* A New Lease of Death (Inspector Wexford, #2)3* Wolf to the Slaughter (Inspector Wexford, #3)2* The Best Man to Die (Inspector Wexford, #4)3* A Guilty Thing Suprised #53* No More Dying Then (Inspector Wexford, #6)3* Murder Being Once Done (Inspector Wexford, #7)3* Some Lie and Some Die (Inspector Wexford, #8)3* Shake Hands Forever (Inspector Wexford, #9)3* A Sleeping Life (Inspector Wexford, #10)3* Put on by Cunning (Inspector Wexford #11)1* Speaker of Mandarin (Inspector Wexford, #12)3* An Unkindness of Ravens (Inspector Wexford, #13)3* The Veiled One (Inspector Wexford, #14)3* Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Inspector Wexford, #15)3* Not in the Flesh (Inspector Wexford, #21)2* The Vault (Inspector Wexford, #23)
What do You think about Kissing The Gunner's Daughter (1993)?
From the back of the book 'Sergeant Caleb Martin of Kingsmarkham CID had no idea just how terminally unlucky Friday the thirteenth of May would prove. Even alive, he could have had no inkling of the chain of bloody events that would follow' he dies later that day in a bank heist, shot by a gun that is later used to kill 3 members of the same family at their home, while one member of the family survives. In a counter point to the main story Inspector Wexford does not like his daughters new partner! A well written story with a lot of potential murderers.
—Kate Millin
I've been reading the Inspector Wexford series in order and have enjoyed them all but this one made a leap forward in terms of style and plot complexity. It was good to see that Inspector Wexford's family life is not as idyllic as I'd earlier thought but I was sad that his daughter Sheila was so badly snookered by a jerk. Luckily, she didn't marry him! Wexford's familial infatuation with Daisy struck me as very real but I was glad he shook himself out of it before the final events or that would have been heart-breaking. I expect the rest of the series to be of this caliber. I really liked it.
—Kathleen O'Nan
