Brilliant book with an unusual story and also one that tugs at the heart, contains mysteries, and is a thoughtful statement on those living in homes for the elderly and what they may endure silently. And how they deal with it. Fascinating. If you like offbeat literary stories, you might like this book. I did! ( )

A wonderful surprise! Quick read too! To quote the back, "gives us a brilliant and haunting variation on the classic drawing-room murder novel." Indeed it does! An old folks home, run by an abusive brother and sister team, is slowly losing residents to death. Is it natural, or is it murder? Two intrepid older ladies try to find out - old school detective style! And a soccer obsessed detective tries to keep up with them! It's a fun who-done-it with great characters and fun plot twists, especially at the end. I really liked the way the plot unrolled for the detective as his mind recalled soccer games of his youth. And the character Anderson is a hoot! I'm so glad I took a chance on this - it's a winner! ( )

Here’s an unusual mystery: Michael Dibdin’s The Dying of the Light , published in 1993 and reissued in paperback in 1995.

The book opens at tea time, in the lounge of what appears to be an English nursing home, where the old folks’ names sound as if they came out of a Clue game or an Agatha Christie novel: Colonel Weatherby, Lady Belinda Scott, Canon Purvey, and the corned beef millionaire, George Channing, who turns out to be the first victim.

In this setting, two of the characters, Rosemary and Dorothy, are amusing themselves and trying to keep their minds alive by pretending they are indeed in an Agatha Christie novel: they speculate that the last two deaths in the home were the result of foul play rather than natural causes, and they invent linked romantic pasts for the other guests, providing them each with a motive for doing away with their late companions.

Then Dibdin begins to twist the plot. First a cruel nurse attendant enters, striking one of the guests, snarling, threatening the rest. “Aha!” we think, “perhaps there is more to Rosemary and Dorothy’s speculation than game playing.” Then we learn that the clock in the lounge always says ten past four, and we see some of the guests behaving in a very disturbed way. “Aha!” we think, “Rosemary and Dorothy aren’t just playing mind games; they’re nutty as fruitcakes and so is everyone else; this isn’t an old people’s home but an insane asylum.”

Then Rosemary finds Dorothy dead, an apparent suicide, and we realize Dibdin has tricked us again: we have to take seriously the murder speculation that Rosemary and her dead friend have been indulging in. Dibdin plays with the reader in this way throughout: First Rosemary is set up in the tradition of the elderly female amateur—that is, the Miss Marple type—but then she is undercut, then set up again, but we are always reminded that she is also an inventor.

When a police inspector from the county constabulary enters, we are ready to play Dibdin’s game and to guess whether the constable will look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be brilliant, or look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be . . . a bumbling idiot. The questions remain right up until the end: will Rosemary be able to convince the inspector that her friend was murdered? Was Dorothy in fact murdered? When Rosemary leaves herself off the list of possible suspects, does that mean we should suspect her? Dibdin keeps shifting the ground under us, and ultimately creates a kind of paradox: a book that is both a good mystery and a good parody of a mystery. The Dyling of the Light is a dark book, but an entertaining one that will keep you guessing. ( )

Niet onaardige parodie op de detectiveverhalen van Agatha Christie. ( )

Clever and engaging once you get past the disorientation of the first few pages, but very minor overall - a perfectly good light entertainment. Some occasional black humor - but more of a tale of misdirection than anything else. Hard to say based on this if I would seek out another Dibdin book or not. ( )