Tani (USA: CA) (2012/07/13): I always like books that teach me something or alert me to new things, besides entertaining, and this one did both. It led me to look up bell ringing on the Web, and it turns out to be a fascinating subject that I hardly knew existed.
Lord Peter Wimsey's car goes into a ditch in a snow storm on New Year's Eve and the rector of a nearby church puts him up for the night. There is a passing reference to people dying of the flu, which makes me wonder if the story is set around the time of the Spanish influenza pandemic. So many villagers are ill that the rector is terribly disappointed because it will be impossible to ring the bells ("change-ringing") for nine straight hours as he had been planning. However, Lord Wimsey volunteers to help, and thus is drawn in to help with an old mystery and a new murder a little later.
