What Fiction are you reading this week, Dec. 13, 2020?

[Wicked Blue]

7. The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh

It features Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, characters created by the late Dorothy Sayers.

Paton Walsh, who is also now deceased, did a marvelous job of completing Thrones, Dominations, an unfinished Sayers mystery. She then wrote three more Wimsey mysteries, including her final one, The Late Scholar.

This one, like Sayers' Gaudy Night, is set at Oxford University, from which Wimsey and Vane were described as having graduated.

It centers on the question of selling or retaining a very old manuscript from the time of King Alfred the Great. The faculty at the fictional Oxford college of St. Severin is evenly divided on whether to keep the manuscript, and members of the faculty are dying or disappearing mysteriously. Lord Peter, as the hereditary college Visitor, is summoned to facilitate a decision over the fate of the manuscript, but becomes involved in investigating the murder or murders with his wife Harriet.

Sayers managed to create characters who are so thoroughly detailed in even their littlest quirks and habits, that the reader feels they are long-time friends.