A strange book: not a whodunnit, or even a howdunnit or whydunnit. Adam Penhallow of Trevellin is a tyrant of a family patriarch, one who derails his adult children’s plans and independence by insisting they be clustered around him in the family’s Cornish mansion forever. Georgette Heyer spends the first 3/4 of the book detailing Penhallow’s bullying, his drunken rages, and his manipulations, and she is creative in describing his outsized—even Shakespearean—personality. “The robust and generally unthinking brutality of his maturity was changing to a deliberate, if irrational, cruelty, which seemed often to be as purposeless as it was ruthless,” she writes. “From having exercised his power over his dependents to force them to conform to that way of life which suited himself, he was now showing alarming signs of exercising an arbitrary tyranny for the sheer love of it” (121). His second wife, Faith, is nearly driven to madness and his many sons are pitted against one another by his machinations. When someone in desperation finally murders the old man, surprisingly no one is released from their miserable lives at Trevellin. This family is not necessarily one you can enjoy spending time with; the interest is in unwinding the madness that one tyrant can wreak.