Book recommendation for the holiday season

Especially in these pandemic / home lockdown days, I do a great deal of reading, just for my own enjoyment. Often, when time permits, I’ll be reading both a fiction and a nonfiction work, so I can keep both fresh by alternating between them. My interests in the latter include history, popular science, travel, and memoirs / biographies. In the former, contemporary and world fiction, along with classics, and genre work such as murder / private eye mysteries.

In the last of these sub-categories, I’ve been enjoying a new find so much that I feel I ought to share it, especially insofar as my readership here includes lawyers and tax people. Sarah Caudwell’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered would be a conventional mid-twentieth century English murder mystery (albeit published in 1981), a bit in the Agatha Christie style with unfolding clues, except that it’s line-by-line hilarious. The first person narration, with extensive dialogue between the characters and long letters that they write to each other, seems to have stepped out of the pages of Oscar Wilde, mixed perhaps with a bit of Wodehouse.

Lawyers and tax people may enjoy its featuring a group of English barristers who are good friends and like to banter with each other. The book also prominently features a tax lawyer who is getting audited because she didn’t file tax returns (she thought of the tax system as merely something she reads about in books  so she can advise clients – not as a part of real life). Now she feels that Inland Revenue is unfairly harassing her. She is always giving advice such as: find an excuse to deduct your holiday trips as business; or, if you are rich, marry someone poor so you can take maximum advantage of the income-splitting provisions. She is distressed when clients find this advice unromantic. Also (not a spoiler because it happens early), she gets arrested because – while she is on vacation – police found her inscribed copy of the Finance Act at the scene of the crime.

Just one last bit to give more of a sense of its style: the narrator, Hilary Tamor, an Oxford don who is friends with all of the barristers, is a bit of a pompous and prissy snob, given to high-toned elocution, whose gender we never learn (throughout four books in the series).