Mitchell, Gladys - Lament for Leto (1971)

Review by Nick Fuller

3/5

While I had dismissed this book as a dull and lifeless retreading of Come Away, Death (no doubt occasioned by reading the one straight after the other), a rereading reveals it to be quite a pleasant travelogue, if an indifferent detective story. Amongst the entertaining tourist stuff around Greece, there's some decent character work and witty (if monotonously unlifelike) dialogue - closer to Wilde's epigram than natural conversation. The murderer turns out to be the character marked from the beginning, which is preferable to Mitchell's often arbitrary solutions, particularly after the nadir of the 1960s. A pleasant, if minor, work.