A Generation of Vipers: An absolutely addictive and page-turning British cozy mystery (A Dr Nell Ward Mystery Book 4)

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Well, I certainly didn't intend on falling behind in my Inspector Lewis-related blogging, but at least with my recent battle with bronchitis and pneumonia I have a good excuse. But when a member of the drug operation makes a break for it and heads straight for their stakeout point on the perimeter, my favorite Oxford investigators really get a moment to shine -- getting in a tussle with the runaway suspect and ending up on the news!

I found no inconsistencies of description, and there's good reason to believe the author knows the setting well. Miranda Thornton, the dead professor, was known as the author of a book about how single women can thrive without men in their lives. It features some very strong male performances, Lewis always tended to have strong female leads throughout, but here the episode is dominated by Toby Stephens, Daniel Lapaine, and I think fair to say by regular Laurence Fox. Consider, in the paragraph quoted above about Washington, "orgiastic claptrap," "perfervid and florid," "peewee excesses," "niggling lavishnesses," etc.Early in the episode, Professor Thornton lectures on the duality of Shakespeare’s women: “for every female character in Shakespeare who conforms to society there is one who flouts it,” she says. In one of the many footnotes to the 1954 edition, he insists that "since I love women more than most men, I believe I love them more deeply and knowingly," but the evidence on the printed page is almost entirely to the contrary. On and on he rolled, a veritable Mississippi of bile, churning out word upon word to a total of some 100,000, just about every one of them quivering with rage -- though whether real or simulated rage remains unclear to this day.

However, the area where Nell is working is the domain of the "Heath Hunter" and she seems to be in his targets. Meanwhile, Oxford English professor Miranda Thornton ( Julie Cox) is running into trouble with some of her students. Wylie’s analysis of the workings of Congress could as easily be talking about AOC, Elizabeth Warren and Lauren Boebert as any of the politicos of his day, when there were no women in Congress. Wylie’s literary identity was elusive; he wrote nonfiction and fiction in nearly every genre, but his work can be roughly divided into four periods during which his concerns were dominated by a single subject: science fiction, social criticism, nuclear war, and the destruction of the environment. I was pleased that some of the characters IThe idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift — an idea promulgated by every medium and many an advertisement — has defeated half the husbands in America,” Wylie wrote. Then there’s the character of Sebastian Dromgoole, whose name is probably a reference to Will Allen Dromgoole, a 20th century female poet from Tennessee.

He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1925, only to be dropped from the magazine two years later. In this series Sarah Yarwood-Lovett has established a strong balance between the central murder mystery and the environmental case that Nell and her colleagues are addressing.The spectacle of someone making an absolute fool of himself is always enjoyable, so watching Wylie put himself through these ridiculous paces was amusing, but "Generation of Vipers" is warmed-over H.