Clock Strikes Twelve (A Miss Silver Mystery, #6)

by Patricia Wentworth

New Year's Eve, 1940, is unusual for the Paradine family. Departing from tradition, James Paradine makes a speech that changes the course of many lives. Valuable documents have disappeared. A member of the family has taken them. The culprit has until midnight to confess and return the papers.

A few minutes after twelve James Paradine is dead.

It is left to Miss Silver to disentangle the threads that bind the Paradine family in a strange web of dislike, hatred and fear.

• Publish Date: 1944
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: J.B. Lippincott Company
• Edition: US Second Printing
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 432
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

The Clock Strikes Twelve starts off with an interesting premise: It's New Year's Eve 1941. A country house family gathering. Secret government blueprints disappear. The assistant (and former something-in-law) who delivered the blueprints is called back to the house, and the man in charge sets an ultimatum to everyone who might have had access to the blueprints.

So far, so good. But also, so similar to two Sherlock Holmes stories, and there is also a particular Poirot story that jumps to mind.

Anyway, plots don't exactly thicken but characters are assembled, backstories are revealed, ... a lot of time is spent on describing details upon details. I'm sure this was all supposed to help flesh out characters etc. but just didn't work for me. I lost interest. None of the remaining characters had anything compelling about them. And I really couldn't have cared less about the thwarted relationship angle.
So, for me, this just dragged, and in the end, the solution was just meh.

As for Miss Silver...ugh, I wish someone had given her some cough syrup.
She coughs about 38 times throughout the entire book, and since she only makes an appearance half-way through, the coughing is noticeably condensed.

This one was not for me.