Nick Davies's Reviews > The Franchise Affair

I quite enjoyed this (certainly a pleasant change from gritty and fast-paced crime thrillers etc.) and found it charming and witty. Fascinating too how attitudes have changed in the last 75 years since this was published, I was surprised at some of the casual sexism and class differences which were very much of the time.

What was an intriguing mystery (that of a teenage girl making accusations that she'd been kidnapped, imprisoned in an attic and made to act as a maid) that's based on a real life case if I understood correctly, it was slightly bogged down in excessive description and a sense that in the end the mystery wasn't so much solved by anyone as 'had someone appear fifty pages from the end and the whole thing fall in the lap of the hero'. I felt therefore less enamoured of this than the other Josephine Tey's I have read.