Thomas (Dancing in the Dark, 1993, etc.) drags the inimitable detective out of retirement still again to investigate seven mysteries closely based on historical fact, from the alleged bigamy of George V (a case that brings him to the attention of Professor Moriarty) to the theft of the Irish crown jewels from an impregnable strongroom. Holmes journeys with a grumbling Watson to Paris to vindicate Captain Dreyfus (embroiling himself in the death of French President FÇlix Faure), books passage to Yokohama for the second of two cases of arsenic poisoning, and allies himself with the pyrotechnical barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall for two cases closer to home. Holmes’s repeated defense of hopeless cases casts him as an unlikely Perry Mason, and the cases themselves—spacious and leisurely, unfolding over a period of months or years—do more justice to history than to Holmes. But dedicated Sherlockians will appreciate the novelty of the great detective’s incursion into real-life crimes that don’t involve Jack the Ripper.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0516-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The news that faithful old Canon Arthur Brydges-ffrench, the stuck-in-the-mud subdeacon of Malbury Cathedral, has been passed over for the deanship in favor of pushy, politically connected Londoner Stuart Latimer sets two novels—well, one and a half—in motion. The first is a disarming comedy of clerical manners in which the cathedral's four canons, their wives, the caddish cathedral architect, the predatory head of the Friends of the Cathedral, the holders of the franchises for the cathedral refectory and gift shop, and the retired schoolmistress still hoping to snare the subdeacon into marriage all scheme endlessly to get the better of the new dean, or, failing that, to get on his good side or bail out. It's so amusing to watch the touchingly venial machinations of the good-hearted Malbury Close regulars that it's a shame when a fatal poisoning—no, it's not the well-hated new dean after all—kicks off the second novel, a whodunit that's shorter, less persuasive, even more amateurish, than the first, as if Charles (The Snares of Death, 1993, etc.) had suddenly remembered that her regular sleuths, artist Lucy Kingsley (whose father is the least devious of the canons) and her lover, solicitor David Middleton-Brown, were waiting with the meter running and nothing to do. About what you'd expect if Trollope decided that what the Barsetshire novels needed to juice them up was a tincture of illicit (albeit well-bred) passion and homicide.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89296-548-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A nasty surprise awaits Faith Fairchild's old friend Pix Miller when she goes to check on the construction of Faith's new summer house on Maine's Sanpere Island: There's a body carefully wrapped in a quilt hidden in the basement. Even though the contractor would soon have covered the corpse of itinerant restorer Mitchell Pierce in cement with no one being the wiser, still, as Pix's elderly mother sagely remarks, ``It's not the way one likes to start a new house.'' (Faith's own reaction: ``It'll be weeks before they let us continue.'') And the trouble on Sanpere has just begun: Pix's daughter Samantha finds three decapitated mice at her summer camp, a display of plastic bats with painted blood, and a gull with its throat slit. Sounds like decorator Valerie Atherton's incorrigible teen Duncan Cowley. But would Duncan really kill Mitch Pierce—or local celebrity quilter Adelaide Bainbridge, who's found wrapped in another quilt? Or are the crimes connected instead, as Pix suspects, to a ring of antiques forgers that may just include the off-island stranger who'd been so attentive to Addie? Though Pix does duty for barely-there Faith (The Body in the Cast, 1993, etc.), the mixture is otherwise familiar. Unremittingly nice suspects and down-east recipes establish a family-values backdrop for a killer who faces the need to kill Pix by fretting: ``Our parents used to play bridge together.''
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11470-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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