#in that the book is a mystery novel

[emilysidhe]

There was a book I read in high school that I remember as being the only book I’ve ever read that could accurately be described as a mystery novel where the mystery never gets solved.

I don’t remember the title, but it was about the (fictional) last woman to be executed by hanging in England. In the novel, she had killed her younger sister, and the book was from the POV of their now adult niece (their brother’s daughter). Years after the execution, a nonfiction writer was attempting to interview surviving family members to write a book about the case, and they were circling the wagons, but also discussing the case themselves and the niece was trying to piece together what she thought about it.

Spoilers for this unknown book, but the real mystery was not what happened (the older sister’s guilt was never in doubt), but why she had done it. I think the older sister’s name might have been Vera? Anyway, Vera killed her younger sister after the sister (who had married a lord and discovered she was infertile) started taking an unusual interest in Vera’s toddler, and Vera seemed frightened and threatened by that attention. The child had been born during WWII when Vera’s husband was serving overseas (in fact, the birth was 10 months after he shipped out) and Vera’s then unmarried sister had been living with her at the time and barely left the house because she was getting over a bad breakup. The obvious supposition is that it was the younger sister’s baby and Vera claimed it because she was respectably married and the sister wasn’t, but Vera was an unpleasant person and the family members who knew her best agreed that it would have been out of character for her to do something like that, especially without telling her husband or other family members, especially when the baby was born a month late and exposed her to whispers. But if she hadn’t, then why was she so certain that her sister would be able to take her child from her that she thought murder was her only option?

The narrator was probably in the best position to know the real truth as she had also been staying in the house during those crucial months when the husband had just shipped out and the sister’s boyfriend was still around, but she was only a child then and lacked context for the adult dynamics she was observing, and looking back on her memories, the narrator is unable to come to any conclusions.

I’m surprised how much this book stuck with me years later, so if it sounds familiar to anyone else, I’d love to know the title to try to find it again.