The Sedleigh Hall Murder is the first book in Jeff Lewis’s Eric Ward trilogy. Ward, who left the Force because of a chronic case of glaucoma, but not before finishing law school while still a policeman, as the story gets its start, clerking for Paul Francis, the son of the patriarch and co-founder of the law firm Francis Shaw & Elder, in Newcastle. Ward hopes to complete the required clerkship to stand for the other conditions to become a solicitor.
Francis junior is a rather lazy and superficial professional who is quick to shop off the preparation of complex cases to his law clerk. In contrast, Ward is very thorough, pedantic, and paying attention to the smallest of details. Unfortunately, however, he has periodical bouts with severe flare-ups of his illness, which makes him debilitated for hours, sometimes even overnight.
Paul assigns two cases in succession to Ward to work on. One is relatively straightforward, the disbursement of the earthly assets of Arthur Egan, who just passed away, among his possible, yet unidentified, heirs. The other, much more complicated, and work-intensive case is legal advice to the firm’s prime client, Lord Morcomb, who owes a substantial sum of death (inheritance) tax to Inland Revenue.
With the Egan case, Eric finds out that on top of advertising in the local papers the inheritance, there is very little to go on. The responses to the adverts are from obvious crackpots, and no others come to claim their share. Ward discovers rather early, however, that 20 years ago, Arthur Egan was convicted of manslaughter, bargained down from murder, for which he served six years as the guest of Her Majesty’s prison system. What puzzles Ward with his initial looking into the case is that the viciousness and seeming irrationality of the murder is 180 degrees opposite with Arthur’s character and history.
As the adage goes (not really, I just rephrased one), you can take the policeman out of the Force, but you cannot take the Force out of the policeman. The contradiction in character forces Eric to look deeper under the Egan case than what is open and shut on the surface.
As all mysteries/whodunits, as a matter of their nature goes, there is much more there than meets the eye. Furthermore, as Eric gets more obsessed with finding the truth about Eagan, he realizes that the two cases, Egan and Morcomb, are inosculated.
Of course, Eric solves the mystery, but his ultimate observation of the two cases is rather sad:
“. . .as Ward stared at the old man {Lord Morcomb, my addition] slumped in the chair, weighed down by the guilts brought home to him, he recognized that there had been a certain desperate inevitability about it all. The people who had lived out those days, all those years ago, could have acted in no other manner than the way they did.”
This is gloomy, although reflective observation on a society that was (perhaps, still is) a hostage of many centuries of tradition and customs that supersede justice and fundamental human rights.
The book is beyond well-written. The language is charming, the plot is interesting, and Lewis never for a moment leaves you bored. One attribute to a book, among other few, that it is entertaining. The Sedleigh Hall Murder for sure is, and it gets my five stars.
OR
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2021
Top reviews from other countries
- ANDRIA MReviewed in Canada on August 5, 2019
No dramatics, forensics or cell phones.... but a hauntingly good read
