NO TRUCE WITH TIME

A smooth, finely constructed and intelligently detailed love story, which although fully acknowledged by the author, is as tried as true. It is also a slight story, but Waugh has a pretty sharp sense of his characters, particularly his women, what they are thinking and feeling, which adds more substance than this might otherwise have had. It's good enough reading, if more rental than sales bent. The plot is that of a young woman, tied to an asthmatic, worn husband much her senior down on a small West Indies island. A boy of twenty two comes down, with whom she has an affair made doubly delightful by its secrecy and transience, and which, when threatened by his turning to a young debutante, leads her to the murder of her husband so that she can fight the younger girl on equal ground. And then, although his death is passed off smoothly at the inquest, the net closes in gradually when an insurance agent starts to investigate her claim. Light, but slick.