A review by robinwalter
Death in the Cup by Curtis Evans, Moray Dalton

mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I've finished nine other Moray Dalton books, most of them featuring her primary series detective, Inspector Collier. This is not a Collier novel but one of her Hermann Glide series. The Glide stories I'd read before all had Collier in them as well to a greater or lesser extent. This one was all Glide, more or less. I say more or less because he didn't turn up until halfway through the book. 

I chose this book as something of an experiment because I was on the fence about the Hermann Glide character and the books in which he features. One of the things that makes it difficult for me to come to a firm opinion about Glide as a detective is how seldom he appears in them - even in those stories in which he is the central detective. In this one, as in the others I've read, he seems to operate more offstage than on, effecting an investigation as a kind of sleuth ex machina. 

Happily, that didn't detract from my enjoyment of this book because Dalton writes very well. She describes people well, often with an acerbically droll kind of observation, as in this example 

The other was the possessor of the kind of good looks that are often described as Byronic. In other words he was dark and he looked unhappy.


But to me, she especially excels at creating atmosphere. This is very noticeable in some of her other works, especially her non-series works like Death at the Villa. I would put this book right up there in terms of how well she created a sense of place and a sense of mood. This paragraph illustrates that  for me:

The Fates, for the most part, work unseen, but there are moments when they can almost be descried, like clouds forming in a sky of storm, brooding, implacable, about to complete some pattern on their tremendous loom.

And indeed this whole book was more about painting a picture of the people and the place, dwelling on the mental and emotional state of the characters and describing their closed-off world, than it was about working out whodunnit. Which is just as well, because the actual culprit was obvious almost from the start and the motive one that I am never comfortable with. The motive is credible enough, but it always feels like a bit of a copout and a touch clichéd. 

Despite that niggle, this was, overall, another enjoyable Dalton outing. My internal jury is still out on Hermann Glide, but for making sure that I felt like I was there in that claustrophobically off-kilter community for the entire duration of the story, I'm giving this 4.5/5