Blood on the Wood

by Gillian Linscott

Book Overview

When the suffragette movement is bequeathed a valuable painting by campaigner Philomena Venn, suffragette and amateur sleuth Nell Bray agrees to retrieve it. The plan is simple: Collect the picture from Philomena's widower, Oliver, take it to Christie's, and sell it to raise much-needed funds. But Nell is in for a surprise when she returns from the Vennes' home in the Cotswolds: The painting he has given her is a fake When Oliver refuses to hand over...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312331487
• ISBN13: 9780312331481
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Charming early 20th century-set mystery

It started with a painting. When a dying suffragette leaves a painting to the 'movement,' activist Nell Bray is sent down to the Cotswolds in rural England to pick it up. The suffragette's family tries to foist off a counterfeit and Nell end up cast into an adventure that starts with a plot to steal the real painting--and ends up with broken engagements and murder. Everyone in the Venn family seems to be hiding something. At first, Nell is willing to believe that they are simply trying to protect the fiancee--but could their motives be darker? Could her revolutionary acquaintance, Harry Hawthorne be right that the family was willing to kill to protect their property--and kill again if necessary? Set in the early twentieth century when woman's suffrage is still a distant hope, when revolutionary socialists are filled with hope for the worker's utopia, and when women still need to be concerned about their social standing and their chances of being 'ruined,' BLOOD ON THE WOOD is a strangely powerful mystery. Nell Bray is an entertainingly complex character--hard-working for suffrage but realistic enough to know that it will take time and compromise. Her moral dilemma over how much to tell the police rings true. Author Gillian Linscott does a fine job depicting those turbulant times and the characters who lived through them. The suspects--song-hunting dilitante, Daniel; widower Oliver; jilted fiancee Felicia; and too-clever lawyer Adam are all worth looking at--all have motives, all could have benefitted through murder. If you're looking for a cerebrial mystery with a charming early-twentieth century setting, BLOOD ON THE WOOD is a can't miss opportunity. I enjoyed this one a lot.

This sufragette sleuth outdoes herself

Linscott's spirited suffragette, Nell Bray, finds herself explaining to the police how she discovered a body in the course of a midnight robbery as this latest mystery of murder and politics in early 1900s Britain gets underway.It all happened because a valuable painting, bequeathed to the Women's Social and Political Union, turned out to be a fake - commissioned after its owner's death by her husband, Oliver Venn. So, when a splinter group of the Fabians - the Scipians -gathers to camp at the Venn's, Nell decides to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, by sounding out the Scipians' commitment to women's suffrage while confronting Venn about the painting.It's the younger Venn son, Daniel, a collector of folk music, who comes up with the plan that Nell should steal the picture that's rightfully hers. Daniel has also just got himself engaged to a silent, abused member of the agrarian classes, no matter that he's already engaged to quite a nice woman of his own sort. It's the downtrodden waif who turns up dead during Nell's quasi-sanctioned theft.The historical detail, from ladies' fashions to radical politics, merges unobtrusively with the mystery through the likable and entertaining voice of the intrepid Nell. Her sleuthing skills emerge naturally from her forthright personality, as do her well-reasoned forays into the woods in the dead of night after a killer. A delightful series.

engaging historical mystery

Suffragette Philomena Venn donates to the Women's Social and Political Union a valuable painting by renowned French artist Boucher in her will. Member Nell Bray goes to collect the painting so that the group can sell it for a needed influx of cash. When she receives a forgery from the deceased's family and the widower refuses to do the right thing by his wife, Nell takes it upon herself to steal the real one and replace it with the fake.Breaking and entering Mr. Venn's house in the middle of the night proves rather easy. However, the switch is deferred when Nell finds a corpse. Someone murdered the victim and as Nell explains to the constable why she was in the house, she vows to herself to uncover the identity of the culprit so can clear her name.BLOOD ON THE WOOD is an engaging historical mystery that brings to life the early struggles of the suffragette movement in England. The fine amateur sleuth theme is cleverly enhanced by unpretentious looks at early twentieth century society mostly by the extended Venn family, suffragette sisters, or the heroine. Nell as the center of the tale is the real deal so that the audience obtains a wonderful novel that showcases a bygone period in a delightful way as does the previous Bray books do (see DEAD MAN RIDING and PERFECT DAUGHTER).Harriet Klausner