Imogen Quy is a nurse at St. Agatha’s College in Cambridge University. Working part-time gives her the freedom to enjoy other activities like quilting, which is where the story begins. She and two friends must choose a pattern and fabric for a quilt that will eventually be raffled off for the Red Cross funds. This seemingly unimportant activity foreshadows what’s coming in this smart mystery.
The three have different ideas for a quilt pattern: one wants something simple and basic while another wants an elaborate pattern with lots of curves. Imogen likes patterns that are more complex: “one block merged with the next, so that the pattern shifted as you looked, part of one block completing squares or diamonds in the next.” So right in the first paragraph we know what sort of story we’ve landed in.
This sense of unease and shifting ground is reinforced on the next page: Imogen always starts out with fabric with a “tasteful” pattern and “soft harmonising colors,” yet once she puts them together, she finds them boring. When her friend Patsy combines the most unlikely colors and patterns—orange fabric “printed in scarlet blotches” next to a bright turquoise—Imogen finds it unexpected and perfect.
As an independent woman, Imogen supplements her income by renting out her two spare bedrooms—currently to two undergraduate men—and her upstairs flat—now to Fran, a postgraduate student at St. Agatha’s. Fran has a problem: she needs to earn money for her living expenses, so she’s thrilled when the new chair of her department, Professor Maverack, offers her a job.
It’s a new department: Biography. In what seems an aside but is more foreshadowing, a brief conversation among dons gives us a history of biography going back to Plutarch. Their back-and-forth is enlivened by the theories of what is important in a life and how these theories have changed over time.
When Fran meets with Maverack, he tells her he’s been hired to write the biography of a recently deceased Cambridge don, Gideon Summerfield. Maverack doesn’t have time—he’s too busy with his own research–so he proposes that he pay Fran to be his ghost writer. Since the relationship between biography and autobiography is the subject of her dissertation, the job will also give her some good experience.
And the job should be easy because the person previously hired to write the book has already completed the research. When Imogen asks why Mark Zephyr didn’t finish the job, Fran breezily replies, “ ‘He died.’ ”
When that research is delivered, the giant carton disintegrates “String snapped, corrugated cardboard tore open, and bundles and sheets of paper thumped and fluttered everywhere.” What a description! In it I can feel Agatha’s horror and dismay, knowing how hard it will be to restore any kind of order to the precious papers. As she and Fran find after much sorting, the disorder was there even before the box fell apart: different kinds of handwriting, seeming cross-references that don’t make sense, postcards with mysterious numbers on them.
When she finally creates a timeline, Fran finds that there is one summer that is not accounted for. Then Summerfield’s wife, the person who commissioned the biography, comes banging on Imogen’s door demanding that the papers be returned to her.
Such dramatic scenes punctuate this quiet mystery which also abounds in what Donald Maass calls microtension, described as “the line-by-line effect of creating uneasiness in the reader, which can only be relieved by reading the next thing on the page.” For example, Imogen pauses under a cherry tree on “a fine, crisp autumn day” when it is “just warm enough to sit for a few moments on a damp bench and relish the day.” All lovely, but there’s that damp bench.
Large and small moments like these create suspense that keeps the pages flying by. The shifting patterns of the plot also had my mind ticking over even when I tried to set the book aside for a while. I’m not into quilting these days, but Imogen is someone I’d love to sit down and work a cryptic crossword with. I like the way her mind works, sort of a modern Miss Marple. I’ll be looking for more books in this series.
What do you look for in a mystery—or in a quilt?
