JEMIMA SHORE AT THE SUNNY GRAVE: and Other Stories

Nine tales, most of them featuring London's TV interviewer-investigator Jemima Shore (The Cavalier Case, 1991, etc., etc.) and most set on remote, sunny islands like Bow (in the title story), where Jemima has come to interview the last of the Caribbean Archer family--aged Miss Isabelle. Isabelle's Archer Plantation House is to become a museum after her death--an idea not popular with her live-in aide Tina. Then Isabelle is brutally killed in her mansion, not the victim of robbery as it appears but of a clever if frail, rather peremptorily unveiled plot. The Greek island of Bexi, where a pair of fortysomething couples are sharing a villa, is the backdrop for another killing, this one with heavy erotic overtones carefully skirted by the oh-so-genteel characters. The puzzle in ""The Blude-Red Wine"" is wrapped up, then turned on its head in the midst of learned academics at a Cambridge college dinner. ""Out For the Countess"" has plenty of the operatic melodrama beloved by its chief characters, Leila Hopper and her faithless husband. And the neatly sardonic ""Dead Leaves"" involves Mrs. Langhorn, a quiet grandmother, her layabout grandson Marcus, and her bizarre plans for a serene old age. Highly civilized, suavely written--and immensely readable.