The Inheritance

February 1, 2010
Set in 1959, Tolkien's strong if somewhat formulaic legal thriller, his second after The Final Witness
, centers on the trial at London's Old Bailey of Stephen Cade, who stands accused of murdering his Oxford historian father. The evidence against Cade is overwhelming. After learning that he was about to be disinherited, Cade sought out his father, from whom he'd long been estranged, and argued with him. The police found his fingerprints on the gun used in the killing. The investigating officer, Det. Insp. William Trave, questions the accused's guilt, despite the case's prosecutor urging him not to “muddy the water.” The truth may lie in Normandy, where the older Cade was involved in an incident that left several French civilians dead toward the end of WWII. While Tolkien, the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien, could've done a better job of hiding the clues pointing to the real culprit, fans of English courtroom dramas will be satisfied.

Simon Tolkien reads his second novel in the upper-crust tones one might expect of the grandson of the author of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In his prologue, the author explains that his classic country-house murder mystery is set in 1959, before capital punishment was abolished in England. Tolkien introduces, but wisely does not maintain, vocal inflections as he characterizes a pompous prosecutor, an impatient judge, and a raspy throat-cancer patient. He's more consistent with the accents of French witnesses of a wartime atrocity. The listener may need some time to get used to the peculiarly long pauses before dialogue tags, but early breath control issues are soon resolved. B.V.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine