An Owl book ( )

Set in Switzerland, in a picturesque ski resort, this novel was first published in 1971 by Irish author Patricia Moyes.

Jane Weston, a sculptor has invited her friends, Detective Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett and his wife Emmy to spend the Christmas holiday with her in her small alpine chalet. During that time her hired help, Anne-Marie, is charged and convicted with the murder of her husband, a ski instructor to movie stars. Tibbett, suspecting there is more to the story, begins an investigation. The story is well-done but it has all the ingredients for an even better movie.

Preface:
For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins,
The days dividing lover from lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
—A.C. Swinburne. Atalanta in Calydon

I have to add that I love the cover. ( )

Jane Weston accepts the invitation of friends to live in a rustic chalet they have inherited in a village called Montarraz, in the Swiss Alps. Despite primitive plumbing and heating, the chalet has a studio where she can work. She befriends a local orphan girl, Anne-Marie Durey, and as much as arranges the girl’s marriage to a young man named Robert Drivaz by wangling a job for the couple as concierge and handyman at the apartment block next to her chalet.
Robert becomes a successful ski instructor and all seems well until the neighborhood celebrity, a Parisian film actress named Giselle Arnay, starts keeping company with Robert and he becomes convinced she loves him. He goes to Paris to try to connect with her, fails, and returns, drinks, loses his jobs, and possibly abuses Anne-Marie. One April day he is murdered in his own kitchen. Anne-Marie is convicted of the crime, largely because of the evidence of Jane, who says she saw Anne-Marie returning to her place at the time of the murder.
Jane’s friend Sylvie Claudet, who has an apartment in the block next to Jane’s chalet, invites Jane to live in it for a year; her husband the diplomat and she have commitments elsewhere. When the offer is sweetened by Sylvie’s convincing Giselle Arnay to model, Jane cannot refuse. Jane moves in and invites her friends, Henry and Emmy Tibbett, to visit her. She tells them the story of Anne-Marie and Robert, and Henry, who is a Scotland Yard Superintendent, begins to think about it.
When Jane calls Giselle Arnay’s house, her husband Michel Veron blows Jane off, but then Giselle comes to Jane’s, charms her, and spends days sitting for sketches and clay modeling. This much is Jane’s narrative
When Emmy Tibbett picks up the narrative, she confesses she is worried about Jane, who has changed. We’ve already noticed that Jane’s testimony, key to Anne-Marie’s conviction, is flawed: now we begin to wonder whether she is complicit. But when Henry grills Jane about what she saw on the day Robert was killed, it looks as if she was merely mistaken; she thought it was raining because it had begun to grow dark and the girl she took for Anne-Marie was shielding her face with an umbrella. She realizes she never saw Anne-Marie’s face.
Sylvie takes up the narrative and seems to be shielding someone—either Chantal or Giselle. And one evening Giselle begins to play eenie-meenie-minie-mo with a knife, pointing out that anyone present, as well as Jane who isn’t, could have done the murder. Michel is too tall to impersonate Anne-Marie, but he could have used Mario, who is little, to do it; Sylvie was in Paris but could have acted through Chantal, who had Sylvie’s fast car that day. Chantal could have acted on her own. And of course Giselle could have done it. This part of the narrative is a red herring, and a way to lay out the case against everybody. The idea of having the culprit tell the story goes back to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Emmy tells of the visit she and her husband paid to the nightclub where Michel was performing that week, and then Henry’s interrogation of Pierre Claudet. They then trace Chantal Villeneuve as having rented a car in Geneva on the day of the murder and having returned it with mileage that would just explain a drive to Montarraz and back. They rent the same car and drive to Montarraz, confronting the group at the Chalet Perce-Neige and waiting for the fallout—offers of money from Michel, for their assent to the original verdict, and then the arrival of Sylvie and Pierre Claudet. Sylvie admits that Chantal was one of the young girls at the Paris hat shop/brothel called Frivolités where Sylvie worked. Mario Agnelli was one of the boys. According to Sylvie, he attached himself to Giselle and Michel, Robert Drivaz somehow found out about Chantal, and when he was rebuffed in Paris by Giselle and Michel, he went after Chantal, who then killed him.
But Chantal is listening and comes in with a gun, which is taken from her, but then the truth comes out that it was Sylvie, using Chantal’s driver’s license and passport to hire the car, who came to Montarraz and killed Robert, who was blackmailing her. Sylvie’s role in the hat shop seems to have been either using it to blackmail Pierre (who was running the place) into marrying her, or else working a more complicated scheme to convince him to shut it down while ingratiating herself enough to get him to marry her.
There is a sentimental touch in the birth of Anne-Marie’s baby at the end, her rescue from the dour nuns by Henry’s clearing her name of the murder charge, and the reversal when she comes into money (from the Verons and the Claudets, attempting to buy her off) and hires Jane to be her companion and nanny.
The title Season of Snows and Sins comes from a poem by Algernon Swinburne, who didn’t like winter. It’s an ingeniously-told story that uses multiple narrators, a technique that goes back to the very first English detective novel, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The first narrator is Jane Weston, a recently widowed sculptor living in a rustic chalet in the Swiss Alps. Jane befriends a local orphan girl, Anne-Marie Durey, and as much as arranges the girl’s marriage to a young ski instructor names Robert Drivaz by wangling live-in jobs for the couple at the apartment house next door.
All seems well until the neighborhood celebrity, a Parisian film actress named Giselle Arnay, starts keeping company with Robert. Convinced that she loves him, he goes to Paris to try to connect with her, fails, returns, drinks, loses his job, and possibly abuses Anne-Marie. One April day he is murdered in his own kitchen. Anne-Marie is wrongly convicted of the crime, largely because of the evidence of Jane, who says she saw Anne-Marie returning to her place at the time of the murder.
Jane tells this much of the story, and then the narrative shifts to her friend Emmy, wife of a Scotland Yard inspector. Jane has invited the inspector and his wife to vacation with her. The narrative shift allows us to get another view and to see Jane herself as a suspect. Yet another shift in narrator puts us in the house of the film actress in a scene where she confronts all of her guests in turn with the possibility that each might have been the killer. This classic summary of the suspects is a tried-and-true mystery device that wouldn’t have been possible without the shift of narrators.
The Scotland Yard detective is Henry Tibbett, who eventually solves the case and clears Anne-Marie’s name. Season of Snows and Sins was published in 1971, and is the eleventh book about Henry Tibbett in a series of twenty that Patricia Moyes wrote before she died in 2000. She was an interesting woman who also did some film work with Peter Ustinov and, in 1960, wrote a screenplay based on Stephen Potter’s One Upmanship books, the movie was called School for Scoundrels. If you like Season of Snows and Sins, there’re lots more Moyes books to choose from, including a collection of her short stories that has several Christmas season tales and is called Who Killed Father Christmas? ( )