"Whose Body?" by Dorothy Sayers
Whose Body? may be downloaded for free in our ebook catalog.
Meet Peter Wimsey, an English lord with a penchant for solving sordid crimes. Mervyn Bunter, Wimsey's valet, plays Dr. Watson to Lord Peter's skewed Sherlock. The unflappable Bunter is a gifted investigator in his own right and a skilled photographer of fingerprints. He also serves to keep the mercurial Lord Peter on course. Throw in detective Parker, a mild-mannered Scottish bachelor and dedicated Devil's Advocate to Lord Peter's impulsive conclusions. Add Inspector Sugg--the bumbling "arrest first and ask questions later" police official who is Parker's boss. With these colorful characters you have the makings of an entertaining romp of a detective novel, given author Dorothy Sayers' dry wit, careful plot weaving and charming use of language.
What makes this a unique detective novel is that before the crime can be solved, the investigators must decide if a crime has been committed and, more importantly, who is this dead man to begin with? And what is he doing in someone else's bathtub wearing only a pince nez*? Lord Peter's soft-hearted knack for making friends with the suspects complicates the investigation and sometimes weakens his resolve to complete the investigation. After all, for him this is just a hobby.
Were it not for his man, Bunter, the wayward lord might have ridden off into the sunset rather than pursue this case to its rightful end. It is Bunter who gains the confidence of the suspects' man servants. He gleefully, if respectfully, confesses that he plied his snitches with Lord Peter's best port wine and some carefully applied defamation of Lord Peter's character.
Lord Peter himself makes some fascinating observations regarding what he sees at the crime scene and why they have relevance to the crime. Unless she has a photographic memory, the reader will find herself backtracking to refresh her mind regarding these clues. To her credit, Sayers carefully sews up every clue in what has got to literature's the longest suicide note (written by the perpetrator, of course.)
*A pince nez is something like a pair of glasses with no earpieces. The device "pinches" the "nose."
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This one sounds interesting...great title, too!
I love this website, but I have a question. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask it, but here goes anyway. Is there a reason why the covers I see here on the site aren't incluced in the download? Or is it just in the pdf files? They're very good, so I was a bit disappointed when I noticed this.
Otherwise, keep up the good work!
Hi Hannah, thanks for the feedback!
When I started creating these ebooks, I thought the cover would add too much to the size of the file. But now I'm thinking I could at least insert a black and white image of the cover at the beginning. The covers are included in the Microsoft LIT and Kindle ebooks, but none of the others at present.
Now that I have your feedback, I'll definitely start putting them in (I was thinking about reformatting some of the ebooks anyway).
Thanks for the (fast!) reply. I'm glad my comment was of use, and that you'll start including covers in the pdfs! It makes the e-book much prettier, I think, it gives it more of the feel of a real book, and in these times of enormous and cheap hard drives, a megabyte more or less hardly matters anymore (although I don't know if that's true for people who use mobile devices, too). Personally, I prefer covers in colour, but of course I have no idea how much bigger that would make the file, or what other users like.
Once again, thanks for all the work on the website, it's one of my favourite places for ebooks.
(I sent this message by e-mail first, without realising I'd checked the "notify of followup comments" box here, and then I realised I should answer here instead...)
Hannah,
I've just put the cover in the PDF files of "Whose Body" and our new release "Night and Day". So you can download those and see how you like them. The covers add about 100kb to the size, so not substantial.
Thanks again for the comments!
I have downloaded a great deal of the books offered from this site.
I have to agree, the covers are all beautiful,
and I have downloaded the books all on my Kobo,
and all of the covers are there.