New year's Eve 1941 and the Paradine family and their relations are sitting around the dining table when the head of the family Mr James Paradine announcing that a crime has been committed and he knows that it was one of the family, and he wishes the guilty to admit this by midnight.
When James Parridine is murdered Miss Maud Silver in invited to try and solve the crime.
A nice intriguing mystery.

The Clock Strikes Twelve by Patricia Wentworth is a delightful classic mystery, featuring Miss Silver, an elderly lady who knits and solves crimes. If that sounds like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, then you are right on the money. Patricia Wentworth wrote 32 Miss Silver mysteries, which are sadly out of print. Fortunately, Open Road Media has republished all 32 novels in e-book format. http://www.openroadmedia.com/patricia-wentworth I was lucky enough to get one of these through Net Galley.
The Miss Silver books are a must read for any fan of classic English mysteries. The Clock Strikes Twelve is a particularly wonderful example of her writing. James Paradine has gathered all of his nearest and dearest together for a New Year’s dinner, during which he announces that he knows that one of them has been disloyal to the family. The guilty party will have until midnight to come to his study, where Mr. Paradine will be waiting, and confess. Any reader of mysteries knows that, once he has uttered these words, James Paradine has virtually signed his own death warrant. Suspicion falls on each family member in turn, sometimes more than once. Eventually, Miss Silver, who has a reputation as a private investigator, is called in to solve the mystery. Along the way, she adroitly she straightens out the side problems that have created several false leads and red herrings for the police.
Although it is a slight variation on the traditional English Country House mystery, which means that there is a limited pool of suspects, I was still guessing at the killer’s identity until the big reveal at the end. A bit of romance is always a staple in the Miss Silver novels, which I find quite pleasant and not at all detracting from the main mystery.

I had read a previous Miss Silver mystery and been unimpressed, but this one was much defter and more engaging. A traditional cozy very much in the Golden Age tradition, full of emotions and angst. The detection is kept to a minimum, though, and it is not a fair play mystery. The book is much more focused on the players and their relationships, but that doesn't keep it from being satisfying.

Real Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up because Miss Silver

Formula One: Hero and heroine kept apart by Forces
Formula Two: Murdered person has pots of money
Formula Three: Women Are Just As Good As Men (until they find The Man when they become soft, pliant cuddlebugs)
Formula Four: Servants know all. Fear them.

Mixed properly, a light froth of story cocktail goodness is now served. (I typoed "swerved" and had a long stare at it before changing it.) This outing is less frothy, fruity Mai Tai than Boilermaker made with Everclear.

Miss Silver appears at the 39% mark, hacking away in her usual chronic-bronchitis bark, to solve the family crime of grumpy old tyrant-with-a-heart-of-gold James Paradine's defenestration. (Close enough, go with it.) Family secrets, lies, and half-truths are revealed in all their ugly, warty glory.

The Women, now, the women are utterly uninspired and uninspiring. Controlling Old Maid, Fretful Mother, Domineering Spinster, Breathless Insipid Heroine, and Plucky Babe are joined by a small assortment of Servants, loyal but uneducated and, to a woman, unattractive.

The Men are, this being World War II, Doing Their Bit as wealthy industrialists. But they're still handsome and manly! The exception is the Club Bore, a *distant* cousin with body odor. Okay, Author Wentworth doesn't actually say that, but the implication is clear. Other than him, we have the Heir Apparent with girl trouble, the Oily Seducer without money, the Spiffy Stud whose marriage to Breathless Insipid Heroine is under serious siege, the Solid Brick whose Loaf of Happiness in Life is getting moldy with Fretful Mother's eternal dampening tears.

The Plans. They disappear, are noticed to be gone, reappear, and provide Author Wentworth the chance to garnish the plotroast with some wartime paranoia and xenophobic references to The Germ-ans. As it was mid-war when the book came out, I can understand the urgency to use these tropes since Author Wentworth would not be able to as soon as the war was over and no matter how it ended. I still wish they'd been more, I don't know, heartfelt? Organic to the story?

Because this story isn't a World War II story. It's the story of Phyllida Paradine Wray (B.I.H.), adopted daughter of Grace Paradine (C.O.M.). Grace is the sister of James, the murderee. Grace is the tragically unmarried and rigidly controlling universal confidante. Those two things don't make the third without serious alchemy. That alchemy is missing in this book. She's just a controlling old horror. Everyone says how much they rely on Grace, how her common sense and her insight help them through problems. But we never see this, never experience Grace in helper mode. Nor do we even get a clear sense of the conditions that would lead a person in trouble to summit Mount Bosom to seek the oracle.

My vision of Grace Paradine, a Helen Hokinson cartoon character/caricature referred to as "The Club Lady"

So that central failing of character-building renders the rest of the plot flatter, rougher, and less cocktail than carbonated beverage. Then the B.I.H., Phyllida, whose act of rebellion in marrying the Spiffy Stud is frankly unbelievable given Grace the C.O.M.'s harridanity, has no reality—she exists to be the stakes in a frankly distasteful and overheated game played, apparently, over her head. She's just, well, insipid and not a little masochistic.

It is the Dom/sub nature of the relationships in this book that provide the depth charge. It's flavorless as Everclear, since it's uninflected and nuanceless, but like Everclear it's pervasive and powerfully mind altering. Our carbonated beverage was already a disappointment. We were promised a Mai Tai when we got sold a Miss Silver mystery. But then we got (in effect) a good beer spoiled: A bunch of nasty abusers masquerading as Doms, a story of surpassing sordidness with no one to invest in. That makes the resolution of the story, while clearly arrived at by traveling through the plot, unsatisfying.

But the saving grace, for me, why I got as high as three and a half stars, was the grace notes that make Miss Silver's world: Her aesthetic of bog-oak brooches and beaded kid slippers, the country-house splendor that Author Wentworth clearly sees vanishing before her eyes, the frustrations of wartime rationing that are organic to the milieu presented without fuss but with reason.

Miss Silver's idea of loveliness

This isn't top-drawer Miss Silver but it's still Miss Silver and thus possesses certain charms. By the end of the story I was ready for it to be over, but I wasn't ever bored. That counts for a lot.

Wentworth is in a similar vein to Agatha Christie, but it gentler and more amusing.