A FINE PLACE FOR DEATH

Girls will be girls with a vengeance. So Bamford Chief Inspector Alan Markby (Where Old Bones Lie, 1994, etc.) realizes when he tries to find the man who met teenager Lynne Wills just before she said good night at The Silver Bells Tavern and left her dead on a nearby playing field. Lynne's equally young friend Nikki Arnold has a long history of picking up men in pubs. How about Lynne herself? And how about Katie Conway, rebellious daughter of manorial Park House, who shouldn't have any connections at all with that sort of girl, but soon turns up just as dead in her own family mausoleum? As Katie's mismatched parents—neurasthenic heiress Adeline Devaux Conway and her husband, Matthew, who can hardly wait for her to die so he can legitimize his affair with his obliging personal assistant—take turns blaming each other for the tragedy, Inspector Markby and his girlfriend Meredith Mitchell (who, unlike most of these other young ladies, is reassuringly much too old to be called a girlfriend) take turns looking under rocks for suspects, motives, and the antique dresser Meredith has got to have. They find all three, though it's the dresser that ends up revealing the truth about Katie's murder. Interesting people and a nice eye for class distinctions, but the plotting is both uninspired and unbelievable, with two culprits too many.