It's Raining Violence

Anne and Jeffrey McNeill #16

by Theodora Du Bois

178 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Aka Theodora McCormick

Theodora Du Bois was born Theodora Brenton Eliot McCormick in Brooklyn in 1890. She wrote mysteries, historical fiction, short stories and children's literature.

Reviews

[Lisa Kucharski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, it's back to writing the mystery through Ann's eyes! This time the murder and surrounding family is quite complicated... more complicated than normal. It would have been nicer to have a little more reveal through the characters than happened. But I am just happy that the McNeil's are the main focus again.

I also appreciated Jeffrey's no nonsense attitude quite a bit in this one, mostly cause the family's pretentiousness needed a good bop in the nose.

As usual, Dubois has crazy interesting characters.

[Brackman1066 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to rate this one. I like the writing; there were some great sentences. The family of suspects were utterly unsympathetic, though-that part of the novel may just not age well. Also, some silly mistakes. Detectives get called away from dinner for a conversation that takes less than half a page, and we're told that their loyal servant put the dinner in the oven to keep it warm, but it had dried out. In a 3-minute phone call? A round of editing should have caught that.