AN EMBARRASSMENT OF CORPSES

An antic first novel set in London, where Oliver Swithin, as O.C. Blithely, writes children's stories for Tadpole Tomes while working for (or passing time at) the firm of Woodcock and Oakhampton, Ltd. Oliver's uncle, Tim Mallard, is a murder squad superintendent at Scotland Yard, but it's Oliver's fate, after a night of games and drinking at the Sanders Club, to discover the body of fellow member Sir Harry Random, apparently drowned in the fountain at Trafalgar Square, a strange symbol drawn on his starched shirtfront. Thus begins a series of murders (one a day) seemingly connected to one another by signs of the zodiac and little else. A lot of hard thinking and research by Oliver, Mallard, attractive Detective Sergeant Effie Strongitharm and others eventually unearths ties to an old criminal case that all the victims had juried. But the death of research chemist Gordon Paper, killed by accident in a crossbow attack on Edmund Tradescant, who worked for the same company, breaks the pattern and increases the confusion. And there's plenty of that about, to say nothing of plotting that defies description—let alone common sense. There are chuckles along the way, but Beechey overworks his clever wordplay, his Wodehouse-like characters, and, most abysmally, his silly, convoluted story line—leaving the reader to hope for better things from a writer clearly capable of producing them.