Jill Paton Walsh, A Piece of Justice

Jill Paton Walsh, A Piece of Justice

St. Martin’s Press © 1995 Jill Paton Walsh
Out-of-print, but available from used booksellers

The second book featuring Imogen Quy, the resident nurse at St. Agatha’s College at Cambridge University.  Her lodger, Frances Bullion, has been asked to ghost-write the biography of a (dead) mathematician (Gideon Summerfield), whose career consists, really, of one brilliant discovery.  Fran badly needs the job—she wants to finish her doctorate--and a new member of the faculty at St. Agatha’s, Leo Maverack, has contracted to write it, but wants not to.  Fran gets the money, Maverack gets his name on the book.

Meanwhile, Imogen and some friends are preparing to make a quilt to be sold for charity, and we are treated to a discussion of their process.  (Later on, an art historian, whose specialty deals with textiles, presents a rather remarkable lecture on the subject, which might be worth the price of the book.  Both the discussion of quilting and the lecture made me wish for visuals (and this is something that might be possible to do these days, by having a website associated with the book that would allow us to see, as well as read about, these things).

Things quickly become complicated.  Maverack is not the first to have been signed to write the book.  Or the second…he’s the fourth, which is distinctly odd.  And none of the other three seem to be available for consultation; one has certainly died, and the other two are nowhere to be found.  However, it does mean most of the research has been done.  But Fran discovered that, in the detailed chronology of Summerfield’s life, there is a blank—there is no record of what he did in the summer of 1978, and Fran id determined to fill in that blank.

I might note that Prof. Maverack is a biographer…but not in the sense that he writes biographies.  He is a theorist of biographies, and his exposition of his theory of biographies (pp. 31-34) might actually be worth the price of the book.

And things get even more complicated.  Summerfield’s widow gets a court order for the return of all materials that she had provided when the biography was first proposed.

Fran takes off for Wales, where she expects, or hopes, to find an answer to the mystery of the summer of 1978.

Not surprisingly, as this is, after all, a mystery novel, things are both more obscure, more dangerous, and more inter-connected than they appeared at the beginning.  Imogen, of course, gets deeply involved, and in the course of her involvement makes discoveries that are central to all the mysteries.

I enjoyed the first book in this series (The Wyndham Case) quite a lot; this is, I think, even better.  The resolution, when we get there (and this is not a long book) seems almost inevitable, but also almost shocking.  Not only are all the mysteries resolved, but a real injustice is righted.  So I will move on to Book 3 in the series (A Debt of Dishonour) with great anticipation.