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Death on the Cherwell

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Death on the Cherwell

By: Mavis Doriel Hay
Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
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About this listen

For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils to be feared: unladylike behaviour among her students and bad publicity for the college.

So her prim and cosy world is turned upside down when a secret society of undergraduates meets by the river on a gloomy January afternoon only to find the drowned body of the college bursar floating in her canoe.

The police assume that a student prank got out of hand, but the resourceful Persephone girls suspect foul play,and take the investigation into their own hands. Soon they uncover the tangled secrets that led to the bursar’s death and the clues that point to a fellow student.

©1962 The Estate of Mavis Doriel Hay (P)2015 Soundings Cosy Fiction Historical Mystery Traditional Detectives Detective Student
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This book is one of the series of classic crime novels being issued by the British Library. It is set in Oxford and is very much of its period. Accept the world was different 80 odd years ago and you can enjoy it. It is well written and I definitely wanted to know what happened. It was not difficult to guess who had done it but that did not spoil the story.


Golden Age Detective Story

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I enjoyed this book. It was gentle and fun, a story of a lost time of privilege and to some extent naivety. The story was a little obvious but a refreshing change from the blood, violence and horror of many stories today.

Of it’s time

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I really like these 'between the wars' mysteries reissued by the British Library and Mavis Doriel Hay is a good example. She only wrote 3 books of which this, in my view, was her best.
The spoken word version is well produced and the reading is excellent. It captures the period very well and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Perhaps not to everyone's taste and to modern ears and may seem a bit anachronistic. But so it goes......

Death on the Cherwell

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I prefer to listen to narration by a man but I persevered and soon got used to the narration, which clearly distinguished between the different characters, which is very helpful.

I have listened to all three of this author's books and would say, plotwise, this is the weakest but nevertheless still enjoyable for the glimpse it allows into an earlier age. I will definitely listen to this and the others again.

Enjoyable Peek into 1930s Oxford

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