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Henrietta Who?: Complete & Unabridged

By: Catherine Aird
Binding: Audio Cassette
Publisher: Chivers Audio Books
ISBN: 0745157076
ISBN-13: 9780745157078
Released: 29 Sep 1990
RRP: £36.37
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Customer Reviews

Not of woman born? - By: Michele L. Worley, 16 Jun 2005
The village of Larking is one of those quiet smalll towns where everyone fancies they know everything about everyone else, especiallly quiet-living widows like Grace Jenkins, bringing up one daughter, now away at university. It's so smalll that Harry Ford the postman does his round on a bicycle - & he's grateful for it when he finds Mrs. Jenkins dead in the road not far from home, clearly a victim of a hit-and-run driver the previous night. But the formalities of a road traffic accident require a formal identification & an autopsy, so Henrietta is recallled from school to identify Grace Jenkins.

Then Dr. Dabbe delivers his report, & the case goes to Sloan of the CID rather than Harpe of Traffic Division - because Grace Jenkins was run over twice, once each way, & it looks like murder by motorcar. But the most troublesome fact has no immediate bearing on the death, & goes to show that even in a village, some secrets can be kept: Dr. Dabbe's expert opinion is that not only did the deceased never give birth to any child, but she's not likely ever to have been married, either.

So Henrietta isn't Henrietta Jenkins - but who is she? Somebody has been very thorough in covering his or her tracks; the Jenkins cottage was broken into, & Henrietta's birth certificate is missing. Where do you begin when a very discreet woman covered up alll traces of her own identity & that of the child she raised almost from birth? Worse, Grace brought Henrietta to Larking in the middle of WWII - not the best time to try to find records for.

Very good character development - Henrietta has lost the only mother she ever knew, not once but twice, & has to question everything Grace ever told her, & it hits about as hard as you'd expect. There's comic relief, too, when Sloan & Crosby begin tracing people Grace Jenkins mentioned having worked for once, & they find out a lot about her sense of humor. The murder is a fair puzzle, with alll the clues artfully concealed in plain sight, if you're paying attention.