David Roberts, Sweet Poison

A Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne mystery  – Corinth is the dashing younger son of an aristocratic family, with a first from Cambridge and a talent for cricket, but:

Edward was not quite the empty-headed pleasure-seeker  his brother supposed him to be . He was intellectually his brother’s superior but liked to disguise his intelligence  below a veneer of flippancy.

…oh, and he starts to fall for his female sidekick, a spirited but thoroughly respectable female writer, Verity Browne – but here’s the twist, she’s a communist.

Okay, so it wasn’t much of a twist – the only real shock of the whole enterprise is that the estate of Dorothy L Sayers didn’t sue. Note to self: next time I have a hankering for classic cosy crime, revisit the originals rather than waste time on the pale imitations.

The only redeeming feature was the evocation of the political context of the mid 1930s with the reactions from each side of the political spectrum to the rise of Hitler, in the context of the scars of the First World War.