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Whose Body?: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery    by Dorothy L. Sayers Amazon.com order for
Whose Body?
by Dorothy L. Sayers
Order:  USA  Can
HarperCollins, 2014 (1995)
Hardcover, Softcover, Paperback, CD, e-Book
* * *   Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth

Imagine entering your bathroom, looking forward to a long, hot soak and finding a corpse has gotten there first! The dead man is wearing nothing but a pince-nez!

Enter private investigator Peter Wimsey and his valet Bunter. Nothing can please Wimsey more than to have a murder to solve. Barring the loss to the deceased family, he is happiest with a gritty case to keep his interest engaged.

Miss Sayers has been hailed the 'Mistress of the Golden Age Mystery' as well as 'One of the Greatest Mystery Story Writers of the Twentieth Century'. She certainly earned these titles with her many mystery novels. Born in 1893, and with her first novel published in 1923, she wrote what seems like all her waking hours to produce the amount of work she did until her death in 1957.

Whose Body? is thoroughly enjoyable. Wimsey is at his best but would certainly be lost if not for Bunter, who not only acts as his butler but also does a bit of investigating at Wimsey's bidding. Sayers, as usual, weaves a story that is hard to put down. Her clues seem to go off on a tangent but it soon becomes apparent that she is on the trail of the murderer. She creates scenarios that bristle to be solved.

P. D. James asserts that Sayers brought to the detective novel 'originality, intelligence and wit.' Whose Body? proves his point. And she never loses the sense of humor that shines throughout her work.

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