Bedeviled by Libbie Block

Imagine that you wanted very much to kill somebody. You have a long time to contemplate the murder, and the way that you would carry it out. You would be obsessing over it every day. This is what happened to Elizabeth Beel, an attractive researcher for an author. She had been in love with John Maicey, a young composer, who was hoping to make his way in the world of classical music, and they would not marry until he succeeded. Then John's big break came. The very famous conductor, Willem Himbert, promised to conduct John's composition Scherzo.

Then Elizabeth found out about Himbert's wife, Coca Himbert, who was much younger that he was. When Willem discovered a talented new composer and promised to play his music, Coca played up to the young composer, made Willem very jealous, and the young composer never did anything else in the world of classical music. Elizabeth was very much afraid that this is what was going to happen to John. She saw Coca become friendlier and friendlier with John. She was practically on hanging on to him, and Willem was beginning to show signs of jealousy. Elizabeth wanted to kill Coca to save John's career. She fantasized about the ways in which she would commit the murder. She was so caught up in this that there were periods in her life when she had no recollection of what she had been doing for minutes or hours before.

Then Coca was murdered. Elizabeth thought that she was the murderer, and that the murder had been committed during one of those periods of her mental blankness, and just could not remember doing it. To tell you what happened next would be a spoiler.

According to Wikipedia, Libbie Block wrote over 250 short stories and novels. One of her novels was made into a film with Betty Grable. Bedeviled was published in 1947.

Quite honestly, I did not like this book. Possibly a person more interested in psychology than I am would find it interesting. I just did not find the characters believable, and the writing was full of cliches, and dreary similes and metaphors. All the characters would have benefitted from a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. I have read this book for the 2019 Just the Facts, Ma'am Golden Challenge in the category of Why - author's first or last name begin with the same letter as mine. We share both the same first and last letters of our name - LB.