A wonderful addition to the Rowland Sinclair Mystery series.
The place is Singapore and the date is 1935. After months away, Rowland Sinclair is summoned home, ostensibly for business reasons but more likely because Wilfred wants to keep an eye on his younger brother. As Rowland and his friends, Milton, Edna and Clyde, are getting ready to depart they receive the sad news of the death of an Oxford University friend, Daniel Cartwright, in Boston. Unexpectedly, Rowland has been named as executor and the funeral cannot take place until he arrives in America.
His determination to follow his late friend’s wishes is just the beginning of the difficulties and dangers which face the four friends. The original family fortune was largely wiped out in the stock market crash of 1929 and Daniel’s money had been propping them all up, and they had expected to inherit his wealth; instead they discover only small amounts have been left to them. The central theme of the novel is his siblings’ reactions to the bulk of the considerable fortune being left to a man none of them have ever heard of.
The Cartwright family is desperate, in every sense of the word, to overturn the will and insist that the named beneficiary does not exist, for if Rowland finds him and he inherits, not only will the family no longer be wealthy but the closely guarded secret, which they hoped Daniel had taken to his grave, might be revealed.
Gentill’s writing wonderfully captures the hypocritical dichotomy displayed by the siblings: they feel entitled to their late brother’s money but at the same time roundly condemning, if not being abusive about, his lifestyle. And all while endowing Rowland with the same unworthy motives as themselves.
The title A Testament of Character can be read as referring to the kind of people Rowland, Edna, Milton and Clyde are – willing to put themselves in danger for each other and also to help people they barely know! It also serves to highlight the gulf between the characters of the friends and those displayed by Daniel’s siblings. With the benefit of hindsight, one might also suggest such a contrast points up the realities of the 1930s and impending war.
This tenth book in the series seems to me to take place on a smaller canvas – but is no less exciting and fascinating for that. As in the previous Sinclair mysteries, Sulari Gentill weaves fact and fiction together into a wondrous tapestry. This time the narrative features one of the great writers of the period, F Scott Fitzgerald and the patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty, Joseph P Kennedy. But the interactions with such characters seem to be in a more intimate space – more directly related to the four friends, rather than to world events as in earlier books.
Reviewed by Jan Kershaw
Distributed by: Pantera Press
Released: March 2020
RRP: $29.99
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