How good is Dorothy Sayers? So good that even when you know whodunit and even more or less how (rather easy in Strong Poison) the book can still be so enjoyable. It's a detective novel so the air of 'mystery' hangs about but, like previous books in the series, the pleasure comes from the characters, their snappy dialogue and what feels like an insider's view of English society in the 1920's/1930's. 
 In Strong Poison, Lord Wimsey - drunk with love for the accused murderess - hands the reins to Sayers' female characters. It's Miss Climpson and Miss Murchinson who do the detective work in this book and I thoroughly enjoyed the delicacy they used to "get the dirt" so as not to belie their well-mannered personas. Miss Murchinson, for example, poses as a mistake-prone secretary in order to sleuth around the office of a prime suspect. She's saying "oh, I'm so sorry for the typing error, sir" meanwhile she's got skeleton keys in her pocket-book ready to break his safe - I love this. 
 In fact, many of the female characters in Strong Poison strike me as refreshingly intelligent and capable and maybe no small part of the novel's enjoyment is the fact that this group of women come together under Wimsey's guidance to help save 'one of their own', a detective writer with an unfortunate expertise in arsenic. The more of the series I read, the more I appreciate Sayer's brilliance: rest assured that Strong Poison makes for a Strong Book.