Book #91: Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers

After reading Gaudy Night I was interested in reading some more Dorothy Sayers books, and I had actually checked this one out from the library at the same time. It actually turned out to be completely different from Gaudy Night, but still very enjoyable. Whose Body? is the first Sayers mystery novel with Lord Peter Wimsey, her Sherlock Holmes character, and Gaudy Night is maybe her tenth, so it's obvious that there was a change in her style by then. In this book, Sayers introduces Wimsey to us with a bang--a random, unidentified body found in a bathtub of a friend of Wimsey's, who takes it upon himself to investigate. Wimsey and a detective friend of his make the connection between this case and the strange disappearance of a wealthy finance man, and eventually, very excitingly, find the killer of the body. There really isn't much more to say about a mystery without giving away too much of the story.

Gaudy Night was very thoughtful and thought-provoking; the philosophical discussions about the place of women and the role of education were almost equal in importance to the plot and pace of the mystery. But Whose Body? seemed to be much more of a traditional mystery, focused on the plot and the one singular detective and his attempts to uncover the villain. I felt like this story focused more heavily than I am used to on the false starts that Wimsey followed up on which turned out to be nothing, which was kind of fun and misleading for both the detective and the reader. All in all, this was just a fun read with a very satisfying reveal of "whodunit" at the end of the book.