This post was first published in January 2014, but fits in nicely with mine and Yamini’s 50 Women Challenge and my swathes of University reading!
I had only read a couple of Josephine Tey’s novels before I started Brat Farrar, but she is an author whom I very much enjoy. This particular novel was first published in 1949, and is more of a mystery than a murder mystery. The plot is most interesting:
“A stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizeable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s mannerisms, appearance and every significant detail of Patrick’s early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that threaten to jeopardise his plan and his very life…”
I was intrigued all of the way through the book, but sadly the plot twist which was used was quite obvious, and I guessed what would happen just a little way in. The entirety of the story was so well written and plotted however, that it didn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of things. All of the characters were believable beings, and they had qualities which set them apart from one another, which is quite tricky to do sometimes when there are a few protagonists in a novel. Brat Farrar is not my favourite Tey to date, but it is still a great novel.
theliterarysisters 
This was the one Tey novel I had not read so I had to read it last year when I did a feature on Josephine Tey. It is less tense than some of her other books, less sinister, but it had some great moments. Not my favourite, as you say, but worth reading if you are a fan.