The Sirens Sang of Murder by
Sarah Caudwell
pbk out August 02
(Robinson)
at £6.99
This is one of the four 'legal whodunnits' written by lawyer Sarah Caudwell
before her untimely death in 2000. They are unique in style and content and
considering her small output, the author attracted numerous favourable
reviews from both sides of the Atlantic.
Readers will either be entranced or irritated by these books, for the plots are
tortuous and the writing style is pedantic in the extreme - the English is so
perfect that it sounds strange!
The author was a barrister who specialised in international tax planning -
not, you might suspect, a likely source of murder mysteries. Yet the plots of
all her books depend upon complex machinations to do with the bewildering
laws of trusts, inheritance and tax liability. All the books are 'narrated' by
Professor Hilary Tamar, whose gender is never disclosed (though in this
book, I came across a single 'him' which I think was an accidental slip).
Hilary is an Oxford academic and the author, herself an Oxford graduate,
gets in a few subtle cracks at Cambridge! He is an avuncular friend of four
Lincoln's Inn barristers who always feature in the series and provide the
matrix for the legal contortions which usually result in several killings.
'The Sirens Sang of Murder' is largely located in the tax havens of the
Channel Islands and Monaco – there is no way in which the plot can be
summarised, but "suffice it to say", as Hilary would quoth, that a nine
million pound trust fund, set up to dodge tax and capital gains, is the basis
for several mysterious deaths amongst the financiers and lawyers involved.
As in other books, the author gets over first-person narration problem of
reporting distant events, by the sending of long letters or telexes bbetween
the other characters.
Read it for the superb manipulation of language, but take an ice-bag for the
forehead when following the plot - and a large pinch of salt!
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
