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bookwoman1967's review against another edition
3.0
There's been a lot of discussion about this continuation of the Peter Wimsey series by someone other than Dorothy Sayers. Some love it, some hate it. It's been compared to fan fiction. First off, NO ONE is going to write Peter Wimsey like Dorothy Sayers. Personally, I think she far outshone Agatha Christie and was a true master at the British mystery.
That said, I kind of liked the book. It wasn't Dorothy Sayers. But I liked continuing with the characters. The mystery was rather tortuous, without a very believable ending. And of course it's a modern author so no matter how much she tries to write as if it were the 1930s, it's still going to sound like historical fiction, not writing from the 1930s. But, if you take the book for what it is, it's an enjoyable read.
That said, I kind of liked the book. It wasn't Dorothy Sayers. But I liked continuing with the characters. The mystery was rather tortuous, without a very believable ending. And of course it's a modern author so no matter how much she tries to write as if it were the 1930s, it's still going to sound like historical fiction, not writing from the 1930s. But, if you take the book for what it is, it's an enjoyable read.
applegnreads's review against another edition
4.0
I had no idea these existed! How is that possible? Anyway, great to be back with these delightfully awkward newlyweds.
abitahooey's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
cimorene1558's review against another edition
4.0
I like this a lot more than the first time I read it, maybe because I’m willing to let Jill Paton Walsh not be Dorothy Sayers now, which I wasn’t when this first came out. I don’t think I really think of Paton Walsh’s Lord Peter and Harriet Vane as the same people as Sayers’, but I can enjoy them both.
adamrshields's review against another edition
4.0
Summary: Picking up after the honeymoon, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane learn to live together as a married couple while solving a mystery.
Dorothy Sayers published the last full novel of her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series in 1937, Busman's Holiday. Roughly 60 years later, an early draft of this novel was found in a lawyer's safe, and Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned to finish the novel. Three additional novels entirely by Walsh continue to tell the story of the now-married couple, and I look forward to reading those eventually.
One of my complaints about Busman's Holiday was that it was too much about Peter and not enough about Harriet. Thrones, Dominations balances the characters better without placing modern sensibilities on a couple from the mid-1930s. Harriet is trying to figure out how to be "Lady Peter", as she is referred to throughout the novel. She wants to continue to write, and Peter really wants her to continue to write, but she has new duties as an aristocratic lady, and she has less pressure to write because she no longer needs to write to eat.
Peter has to learn to have someone in the house, and I think Walsh gets at his weaknesses (more than just his shell shock) better than Sayers. While the playboy was a bit of an act, there was a reality to his lack of attention to those around him. He has servants, especially Bunter, to care for everything he did not want to bother with. Harriet isn't a servant nor a girlfriend to pine after. She is a real-life woman in his bed who expects to be fully inside his life and not just peering at the same facade everyone else sees.
The murder is one member of a couple that is compared with the Wimseys from the beginning of the book. As I regularly comment, I don't read mysteries to figure out who did it. I read them to understand people. And this is a good book for understanding people.
When I was nearly done with Thrones, Dominations, I picked up the audiobook of Peril in Paris by Rhys Bowen (I read Thrones, Dominations on kindle). Rhys Bowen is a modern cozy mystery novelist that I enjoy. The Her Royal Spyness series is fluffy, and I have occasionally gotten bored with it, but I have continued with it (mostly on audiobook). The first book of Her Royal Spyness seems to pay homage to the first book of Lord Peter Wimsey, Whose Body, when both have bodies in the bathtub as the mystery. And I can't help but feel Perel in Paris also basing some of the characters on Sayer's work.
Both books are set in almost exactly the same time period. (Thrones, Dominations has the death of King George, while King George dies in the previous book for Royal Spyness, but it is within a couple of months of each other.) Both have a recently married couple whose wife doesn't realize she is pregnant and thinks she is just sick. Both have the husbands run off to France to solve diplomatic issues with the new King, and the wives realize that dangerous work for a boyfriend is different than dangerous work for a husband. Harriet is more down-to-earth and aware than Georgie is, but there are some similarities.
What is different is that Sayers/Walsh can't seem to help but have depth, and Bowen can't seem to be more than fluff. There is a section in Thrones, Dominations, where Harriet struggles with whether she should keep writing. This is a condensed part of the dialogue opening with Peter:
This is like Emily Dickenson/Eugene Peterson's "tell is slant." Peter is encouraging Harriet to continue to write her novels because they have depth. And Walsh has continues to keep that depth in a way that Bowen doesn't seem to be able to do. That isn't to say Bowen has no value; I have read 16 of her novels now. But what I get out of Bowen differs from what I get out of Sayers/Walsh.
Dorothy Sayers published the last full novel of her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series in 1937, Busman's Holiday. Roughly 60 years later, an early draft of this novel was found in a lawyer's safe, and Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned to finish the novel. Three additional novels entirely by Walsh continue to tell the story of the now-married couple, and I look forward to reading those eventually.
One of my complaints about Busman's Holiday was that it was too much about Peter and not enough about Harriet. Thrones, Dominations balances the characters better without placing modern sensibilities on a couple from the mid-1930s. Harriet is trying to figure out how to be "Lady Peter", as she is referred to throughout the novel. She wants to continue to write, and Peter really wants her to continue to write, but she has new duties as an aristocratic lady, and she has less pressure to write because she no longer needs to write to eat.
Peter has to learn to have someone in the house, and I think Walsh gets at his weaknesses (more than just his shell shock) better than Sayers. While the playboy was a bit of an act, there was a reality to his lack of attention to those around him. He has servants, especially Bunter, to care for everything he did not want to bother with. Harriet isn't a servant nor a girlfriend to pine after. She is a real-life woman in his bed who expects to be fully inside his life and not just peering at the same facade everyone else sees.
The murder is one member of a couple that is compared with the Wimseys from the beginning of the book. As I regularly comment, I don't read mysteries to figure out who did it. I read them to understand people. And this is a good book for understanding people.
When I was nearly done with Thrones, Dominations, I picked up the audiobook of Peril in Paris by Rhys Bowen (I read Thrones, Dominations on kindle). Rhys Bowen is a modern cozy mystery novelist that I enjoy. The Her Royal Spyness series is fluffy, and I have occasionally gotten bored with it, but I have continued with it (mostly on audiobook). The first book of Her Royal Spyness seems to pay homage to the first book of Lord Peter Wimsey, Whose Body, when both have bodies in the bathtub as the mystery. And I can't help but feel Perel in Paris also basing some of the characters on Sayer's work.
Both books are set in almost exactly the same time period. (Thrones, Dominations has the death of King George, while King George dies in the previous book for Royal Spyness, but it is within a couple of months of each other.) Both have a recently married couple whose wife doesn't realize she is pregnant and thinks she is just sick. Both have the husbands run off to France to solve diplomatic issues with the new King, and the wives realize that dangerous work for a boyfriend is different than dangerous work for a husband. Harriet is more down-to-earth and aware than Georgie is, but there are some similarities.
What is different is that Sayers/Walsh can't seem to help but have depth, and Bowen can't seem to be more than fluff. There is a section in Thrones, Dominations, where Harriet struggles with whether she should keep writing. This is a condensed part of the dialogue opening with Peter:
“You seem not to appreciate the importance of your special form,” he said. “Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They project a vision of a world in which wrongs are righted, and villains are betrayed by clues that they did not know they were leaving. A world in which murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged, and future murder is deterred...Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun, for diversion, as they do crossword puzzles. But underneath they feed a hunger for justice, and heaven help us if ordinary people cease to feel that.”
“You mean perhaps they work as fairy tales work, to caution stepmothers against being wicked, and to comfort Cinderellas everywhere?”
...
“I suppose very clever people can get their visions of justice from Dostoyevsky,” he said. “But there aren’t enough of them to make a climate of opinion. Ordinary people in large numbers read what you write.”
“But not for enlightenment. They are at their slackest. They only want a good story with a few thrills and reversals along the way.”
“You get under their guard,” he said. “If they thought they were being preached at they would stop their ears. If they thought you were bent on improving their minds they would probably never pick up the book. But you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.”
This is like Emily Dickenson/Eugene Peterson's "tell is slant." Peter is encouraging Harriet to continue to write her novels because they have depth. And Walsh has continues to keep that depth in a way that Bowen doesn't seem to be able to do. That isn't to say Bowen has no value; I have read 16 of her novels now. But what I get out of Bowen differs from what I get out of Sayers/Walsh.
siguirimama's review against another edition
dark
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
rebeccacider's review against another edition
4.0
Fan sequels or continuations have a reputation for being awful, but Walsh really did almost get it right in this book. To my (contemporary American) ear, she gets Sayers' voice spot on, and delivers just the right combination of fun character drama and tangled mystery.
There are a few self-indulgent moments that feel more like homages or metatextual commentary on the series, and every scene dealing with current events makes me wonder if Our Heroes would really have had the perfectly-correct-from-hindsight opinions that Walsh paints them with (not that I really see Peter and Harriet being pro-appeasement or anything - but Walsh is still very careful to let us know that they're not). And while I'm glad she solved the Problem Of Bunter without
killing the bromance, I can't decide if I'm satisfied with the way she managed it.
Finally, the mystery was simply a little bit weaker than Sayer's original efforts, no question. Mostly it was very compelling, but there were a couple moments at which the characters had to be stupider than the reader, and a whole lot of coincidence to make things work (like seven different people randomly wandering around the bungalow that night? Really?)
But I really enjoyed it, and there was lots of Peter and Harriet being adorable. What more do I really need? :)
There are a few self-indulgent moments that feel more like homages or metatextual commentary on the series, and every scene dealing with current events makes me wonder if Our Heroes would really have had the perfectly-correct-from-hindsight opinions that Walsh paints them with (not that I really see Peter and Harriet being pro-appeasement or anything - but Walsh is still very careful to let us know that they're not). And while I'm glad she solved the Problem Of Bunter without
killing the bromance, I can't decide if I'm satisfied with the way she managed it.
Finally, the mystery was simply a little bit weaker than Sayer's original efforts, no question. Mostly it was very compelling, but there were a couple moments at which the characters had to be stupider than the reader, and a whole lot of coincidence to make things work (like seven different people randomly wandering around the bungalow that night? Really?)
But I really enjoyed it, and there was lots of Peter and Harriet being adorable. What more do I really need? :)
tracey_stewart's review against another edition
3.0
This is going to be long. I read Thrones, Dominations not too long after it first came out; this is a second reading, and first review.
Of Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers "had written six rough chapters, and devised a plot diagram in coloured inks. When sixty years later a brown paper parcel containing a copy of the manuscript turned up in her agent's safe in London, her literary trustees commissioned Jill Paton Walsh to complete it."
I don't know.
No, that's not true – I do. This is not what fans of Lord Peter wanted or needed. It's not terrible, but I have seen it referred to – often – as fan-fic. I'm not sure the label exactly fits Thrones, Dominations, but it is like a great many Star Trek novels I read when I was a teenager. In so many of those, it seemed very much as if the writer had a generic science fiction manuscript sitting unsold in his drawer, realized Star Trek novels were big at that time, and changed the names and a handful of other details and got it published as part of the franchise despite barely a hint of knowledge of or similarity to Star Trek as aired on television.
I have little background knowledge of Jill Paton Walsh; I'm not saying that she doesn't know and love the Lord Peter books as much as any of us.
But I'm tempted to.
Because there are times when Thrones, Dominations feels like it ought to. The characters strike the right chord for a paragraph, a line of narrative just feels good … and then it goes back to the feeling of the alignment being somewhat off. It's distracting to be wondering throughout the book "was that genuine Sayers or counterfeit?" – hoping in some ways that some of the good lines were JPW, because that would mean she was capable, while knowing given the sheer weight of not-Sayers that it was unlikely. The metaphor that came to me about halfway through (because I do love me a metaphor) was: it's like meeting with an old friend you haven't seen in a long time, and they've changed. Now and then as you talk there's a glimpse of the person you used to be so close to, a spark of what used to be, a connection like the old warmth - and then a minute later you're sitting with a stranger again. A mostly likeable enough stranger, in a way, but ...
A complaint I've read about the book, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that JPW seems to have gone back through the existing novels and gathered up minor characters – from Bill Rumm to Uncle Paul (and someone on the late Yahoo Lord Peter Group is right – he would not have called him Uncle Pandarus in front of everyone) to Harriet's friends Sylvia and Eiluned to Gerry and Freddy Arbuthnot, along with references to canon books (far more than I remember Sayers ever using), and tossed it all like fairy dust into the reader's eyes, hoping for a façade of credibility and/or distraction from the book's deficiencies. I kept waiting for Miss Climpson. Oh, there she is, and Reggie Pomfret too for heaven's sake. JPW tried so hard to cram everything into this book that she didn't spend enough time on anything – including the major characters.
Where there is a plethora of cameo appearances, there is a disturbing dearth of Bunter. He has had a handful of lines of dialogue and one scene in which he sits down for a drink and a debriefing with Peter. Not enough. Not nearly enough. I hate it.
For that matter, there's surprisingly little Parker, and what there is comes off as … priggish. Despite Harriet, he is primly made to state "I don't read detective novels" in an affronted tone. His working with Peter feels off; his marriage to Mary didn't change the way they worked together, why should Peter's marriage? I don't like this Charles, what little we see of him. A line from Charles: "It's like trying to overawe a brick wall". For the sake of my sanity I have to believe DLS would have come up with something sharper than that.
The Dowager Duchess has always been one of my very favorite people in any book, and … I don't think this does her justice. She needs to witter away and still under it all be perfectly sensible. She doesn't witter nearly enough here; there isn't enough fluff.
Harriet is much too deferential to Peter. When she is with him, she seems to walk on eggshells. When she is not with him, she references him or quotes him in nearly every other sentence. She sounds more like a June Cleaveresque 50's housewife than an independent woman who very much has her own opinions, thank you very much. And why is she supposed to have hired a secretary (Miss Bracy)? She's written for years without one, quite efficiently. Was she expecting such massive output that she would not be able to keep up with her own typing? It seems in fact to have had a dampening effect … Yes, yes, the marriage, and she's safe now and doesn't need to write. The incapacitation brought by happiness, along with the surprising leaning toward tragedy for the new book, is nicely done – unfortunately both are beaten to death.
Also beaten to a pulp is the idea that this is a New Thing for Peter and Harriet. Peter has to adjust to having the woman he has sought after so long, to living with her in a new expansive home and the changes that entails. Harriet has all that to cope with, with the added wrinkle that she is going from one income bracket to very much another, from a flat by herself to a stately home with not only Peter but a staff. From dressing as she pleased and going out when she liked with friends to patronizing a pseudo-French dressmaker and attending Wimsey family affairs. It's all new to her, every waking moment.
I wonder if this is why JPW chose to stick so much to Harriet's point of view? We the loyal readers are too familiar with Peter-and-Bunter, and never had much chance to become too familiar with married-Peter-and-Harriet, even less chance than they've had themselves. She might have felt safer using eyes we haven't seen through as much, in a setting which is alien to the character, thereby accounting for any unusual behavior.
Most important of all, Peter ... I don't know. There are brief flashes, as I said. Otherwise, I miss him, even though he's puportedly right there. I've been reading about writing dialogue lately, and that shed light on the problem here. I think that if you take any of the canon books (yes, I do subtract the JPW books from canon, whatever the Sayers estate might say) and strip the dialogue of all the tags ("Peter said" and "said Harriet" and "replied Parker" and so on), it would not be very hard to pick out the lines spoken by Peter (or Harriet or Parker or Bunter, for that matter). Here … Peter's dialogue is very generic, and where it's not it is very similar to lines spoken by Harriet and Parker. There are several Parker lines which I would have attributed to Peter. And Peter … Peter sounds like just anyone. That should not be.)
The "scissors moment" of the book was depressingly clearly telegraphed. I saw it coming so far off. ("Scissors moment" is what it was always called in that Lord Peter Group, the "Aha!" moment, when all the disparate facts of a case rearrange themselves to show the answer. In the first novel, Whose Body, it is illustrated by looking at the letters "COSSSSRI" and finding no meaning until the letters just jump around in the brain and it becomes obvious that the letters give you "SCISSORS".)
The quotes and allusions made by characters are even more aggressively obscure to … well, to me at least, than any Dorothy L. Sayers ever used. I like that classically educated Peter and Harriet are able to volley them comfortably back and forth – they always did. But I don't remember the tags ever putting my nose out of joint quite like this before. (Which could be because I've read the books so many times – but I don't think so.) (I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is meant by "Peter dislikes women with green fingernails" – perhaps a reference to Picasso?)
This is a spoiler, of sorts, but not if you've read the canon stories:
One huge complaint, loud and irritated: Oh, come on, really? Harriet is vomiting randomly and someone actually tells her "You're looking well … Positively glowing"? Oh – spare me. Isn't there some way of hinting a woman's pregnant without using clichés that have been used ad nauseum in every cheesy novel and tv show since time began? Even if I didn't know about Bredon and young Peter and company that very first scene of Harriet sprinting off to be sick – and then feeling just fine shortly after – would have pinged the radar. It couldn't be more obvious without a stork flapping through the scene.
The first irritated and provoked word to come to mind regarding the mystery's solution is, I'm afraid just … dumb. I have an image of Dorothy L. watching aghast from the afterlife, shouting "No! That's why I abandoned the silly story! I put it aside until I thought of a solution that wasn't that moronic!" I didn't figure it out even in this reread, because if I'd thought of it I would have dismissed the idea as too damn stupid.
I go on at great (even greater, that is) spoilerific length about this and quite a bit else on my blog.
Of Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers "had written six rough chapters, and devised a plot diagram in coloured inks. When sixty years later a brown paper parcel containing a copy of the manuscript turned up in her agent's safe in London, her literary trustees commissioned Jill Paton Walsh to complete it."
I don't know.
No, that's not true – I do. This is not what fans of Lord Peter wanted or needed. It's not terrible, but I have seen it referred to – often – as fan-fic. I'm not sure the label exactly fits Thrones, Dominations, but it is like a great many Star Trek novels I read when I was a teenager. In so many of those, it seemed very much as if the writer had a generic science fiction manuscript sitting unsold in his drawer, realized Star Trek novels were big at that time, and changed the names and a handful of other details and got it published as part of the franchise despite barely a hint of knowledge of or similarity to Star Trek as aired on television.
I have little background knowledge of Jill Paton Walsh; I'm not saying that she doesn't know and love the Lord Peter books as much as any of us.
But I'm tempted to.
Because there are times when Thrones, Dominations feels like it ought to. The characters strike the right chord for a paragraph, a line of narrative just feels good … and then it goes back to the feeling of the alignment being somewhat off. It's distracting to be wondering throughout the book "was that genuine Sayers or counterfeit?" – hoping in some ways that some of the good lines were JPW, because that would mean she was capable, while knowing given the sheer weight of not-Sayers that it was unlikely. The metaphor that came to me about halfway through (because I do love me a metaphor) was: it's like meeting with an old friend you haven't seen in a long time, and they've changed. Now and then as you talk there's a glimpse of the person you used to be so close to, a spark of what used to be, a connection like the old warmth - and then a minute later you're sitting with a stranger again. A mostly likeable enough stranger, in a way, but ...
A complaint I've read about the book, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that JPW seems to have gone back through the existing novels and gathered up minor characters – from Bill Rumm to Uncle Paul (and someone on the late Yahoo Lord Peter Group is right – he would not have called him Uncle Pandarus in front of everyone) to Harriet's friends Sylvia and Eiluned to Gerry and Freddy Arbuthnot, along with references to canon books (far more than I remember Sayers ever using), and tossed it all like fairy dust into the reader's eyes, hoping for a façade of credibility and/or distraction from the book's deficiencies. I kept waiting for Miss Climpson. Oh, there she is, and Reggie Pomfret too for heaven's sake. JPW tried so hard to cram everything into this book that she didn't spend enough time on anything – including the major characters.
Where there is a plethora of cameo appearances, there is a disturbing dearth of Bunter. He has had a handful of lines of dialogue and one scene in which he sits down for a drink and a debriefing with Peter. Not enough. Not nearly enough. I hate it.
For that matter, there's surprisingly little Parker, and what there is comes off as … priggish. Despite Harriet, he is primly made to state "I don't read detective novels" in an affronted tone. His working with Peter feels off; his marriage to Mary didn't change the way they worked together, why should Peter's marriage? I don't like this Charles, what little we see of him. A line from Charles: "It's like trying to overawe a brick wall". For the sake of my sanity I have to believe DLS would have come up with something sharper than that.
The Dowager Duchess has always been one of my very favorite people in any book, and … I don't think this does her justice. She needs to witter away and still under it all be perfectly sensible. She doesn't witter nearly enough here; there isn't enough fluff.
Harriet is much too deferential to Peter. When she is with him, she seems to walk on eggshells. When she is not with him, she references him or quotes him in nearly every other sentence. She sounds more like a June Cleaveresque 50's housewife than an independent woman who very much has her own opinions, thank you very much. And why is she supposed to have hired a secretary (Miss Bracy)? She's written for years without one, quite efficiently. Was she expecting such massive output that she would not be able to keep up with her own typing? It seems in fact to have had a dampening effect … Yes, yes, the marriage, and she's safe now and doesn't need to write. The incapacitation brought by happiness, along with the surprising leaning toward tragedy for the new book, is nicely done – unfortunately both are beaten to death.
Also beaten to a pulp is the idea that this is a New Thing for Peter and Harriet. Peter has to adjust to having the woman he has sought after so long, to living with her in a new expansive home and the changes that entails. Harriet has all that to cope with, with the added wrinkle that she is going from one income bracket to very much another, from a flat by herself to a stately home with not only Peter but a staff. From dressing as she pleased and going out when she liked with friends to patronizing a pseudo-French dressmaker and attending Wimsey family affairs. It's all new to her, every waking moment.
I wonder if this is why JPW chose to stick so much to Harriet's point of view? We the loyal readers are too familiar with Peter-and-Bunter, and never had much chance to become too familiar with married-Peter-and-Harriet, even less chance than they've had themselves. She might have felt safer using eyes we haven't seen through as much, in a setting which is alien to the character, thereby accounting for any unusual behavior.
Most important of all, Peter ... I don't know. There are brief flashes, as I said. Otherwise, I miss him, even though he's puportedly right there. I've been reading about writing dialogue lately, and that shed light on the problem here. I think that if you take any of the canon books (yes, I do subtract the JPW books from canon, whatever the Sayers estate might say) and strip the dialogue of all the tags ("Peter said" and "said Harriet" and "replied Parker" and so on), it would not be very hard to pick out the lines spoken by Peter (or Harriet or Parker or Bunter, for that matter). Here … Peter's dialogue is very generic, and where it's not it is very similar to lines spoken by Harriet and Parker. There are several Parker lines which I would have attributed to Peter. And Peter … Peter sounds like just anyone. That should not be.)
The "scissors moment" of the book was depressingly clearly telegraphed. I saw it coming so far off. ("Scissors moment" is what it was always called in that Lord Peter Group, the "Aha!" moment, when all the disparate facts of a case rearrange themselves to show the answer. In the first novel, Whose Body, it is illustrated by looking at the letters "COSSSSRI" and finding no meaning until the letters just jump around in the brain and it becomes obvious that the letters give you "SCISSORS".)
The quotes and allusions made by characters are even more aggressively obscure to … well, to me at least, than any Dorothy L. Sayers ever used. I like that classically educated Peter and Harriet are able to volley them comfortably back and forth – they always did. But I don't remember the tags ever putting my nose out of joint quite like this before. (Which could be because I've read the books so many times – but I don't think so.) (I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is meant by "Peter dislikes women with green fingernails" – perhaps a reference to Picasso?)
This is a spoiler, of sorts, but not if you've read the canon stories:
Spoiler
One huge complaint, loud and irritated: Oh, come on, really? Harriet is vomiting randomly and someone actually tells her "You're looking well … Positively glowing"? Oh – spare me. Isn't there some way of hinting a woman's pregnant without using clichés that have been used ad nauseum in every cheesy novel and tv show since time began? Even if I didn't know about Bredon and young Peter and company that very first scene of Harriet sprinting off to be sick – and then feeling just fine shortly after – would have pinged the radar. It couldn't be more obvious without a stork flapping through the scene.
The first irritated and provoked word to come to mind regarding the mystery's solution is, I'm afraid just … dumb. I have an image of Dorothy L. watching aghast from the afterlife, shouting "No! That's why I abandoned the silly story! I put it aside until I thought of a solution that wasn't that moronic!" I didn't figure it out even in this reread, because if I'd thought of it I would have dismissed the idea as too damn stupid.
I go on at great (even greater, that is) spoilerific length about this and quite a bit else on my blog.