What begins as a ploy to claim an inheritance ends with the impostor’s life hanging in the balance. In this tale of mystery and suspense, a stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s mannerism’s, appearance, and every significant detail of Patrick’s … Patrick’s early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that jeopardize the imposter’s plan and his life. Culminating in a final terrible moment when all is revealed, Brat Farrar is a precarious adventure that grips the reader early and firmly and then holds on until the explosive conclusion.more
Brat Farrar
By josephinetey
You must read this book as if you had never read another mystery since 1940. It creates a time and place that has not been in existence for almost 100 years. It’s more of a book on character development than a textbook mystery but there is definitely a mystery moving the plot forward. The end has a plot twist like none I’ve ever encountered in any …
The characters were so engaging that after I finished the novel, I found myself thinking about them. The mystery was good, if a little sad, and everything wrapped up nicely. The passages about horses could have been tedious but Ms. Tey did a good job and made them interesting. A nice, light mystery – a perfect antidote to the more graphic …
I had a beautiful Folio Club edition of this book by Josephine Tey on my shelf for years without reading it. Then recently in the throes of a horrible cold, I picked it up and began. Brat, the protagonist (corrupted from Bart) is a foundling who is a dead ringer for a twin, Simon, in a well-off English family. Both are 20. Simon’s older twin …
This is the sort of mystery I like best. Full of well-drawn characters, even the minor ones, and so beautifully written I can easily overlook its faults. Which are: a rushed and somewhat glib ending with a massive Unlikely Coincidence, and a major loose end left waving around in the wind. I also guessed two of the major plot points long before …