Book Review : Brat Farrar

This is another excellent mystery by Josephine Tey because the fact that Brat Farrar isn’t who he claims to be is revealed early in the book to the reader, it’s how the revelation comes about for the characters in the novel that is rather clever.

The book doesn’t receive five stars for two reasons.

The first is that most of the main characters in the book like horses and a lot of the background and story context is related to horses. I’m not a huge fan of either horses or rich people who can afford a stable of them, even fictional ones. Secondly, no one would ever be called Brat – a corruption of Bartholomew – and hope to get away with a subterfuge of this nature.

Anyway, Brat Farrar is pretending to be Patrick Ashby and has been coached well, so when he ‘returns’ to his family in the UK after living in the United States for eight years, he’s accepted by most of his family, who thought he’d committed suicide. However, one of the family knows differently and it’s the reason why they know differently that makes for an intriguing ending.