The classic murder mystery plots are reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, and the charming, quirky Beary family...
A lively Vancouver family solves more than its share of murders.
These ten lighthearted mystery stories feature Councillor Bertram Beary and his wife, who are reminiscent of Rumpole and his wife Hilda from the popular British television series, Rumpole of the Bailey. Their son, Richard, is a Detective Inspector with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and their daughter, Phillippa, is an attractive and exceedingly clever opera singer. Throughout this series of stories, Phillippa is often at the scene of a murder, and both Bertram’s insight and his daughter’s flashes of intuition help Richard bring the criminals to justice. The actress of the title is Angela Benson, who, along with her brother Steven, has a perfect alibi for the murder of their wealthy Aunt Maud. Phillippa’s trip to the Seattle Opera affords her the opportunity to catch a murderer and drug dealer at the Canadian border, and an evening on the campaign trail for Bertram allows the whole family to apprehend a murderer who crosses their paths as they hand out leaflets. The thread holding most of the stories together is Phillippa’s career: In addition to opera productions, she appears in musicals and even church passion plays. Each self-contained story focuses on criminals who plan and carry out what they think is the perfect murder, with a particular clever trick providing them with a seemingly perfect alibi. But each time, a member of the Beary family is there to thwart them.
The classic murder mystery plots are reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, and the charming, quirky Beary family make Elwood’s stories enjoyable, if somewhat one-dimensional.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-34409-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.
A teenager with a troubled past becomes the prime suspect in a string of brutal murders, but ex–FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his partner, Rainie Conner, think there’s more to the story.
For the past three years, Pierce and Rainie have fostered Sharlah Nash, now 13, with the hope of soon adopting her. Sharlah’s childhood is the epitome of troubled: when she was 5, her drug-addict father killed her mother and then tried to kill her and her older brother, Telly, but Telly, then 9, bashed his head in with a baseball bat. The siblings were fostered apart, with Sharlah ending up with Pierce and Rainie, whose expertise as parents seems to come from their combined resumes as a former criminal profiler and cop, respectively. Telly, we learn in expansive flashbacks from the now-teenager’s point of view (Sharlah has her own, crowding an already packed narrative), bounced around before landing, age 17, with Frank and Sandra Duvall, a kind couple who are obviously not what they seem. In what appears to be an explosion of unexplained rage, Telly allegedly murders the Duvalls and then kills two people in a gas station before heading off into the Oregon woods, sparking a manhunt and fears that he’s coming after Sharlah. Pierce and Rainie (last seen in Say Goodbye, 2008) work with local law enforcement to build a psychological profile of the teen—which is questionable given the excessive amount of guesswork and second- and thirdhand information used—while trying to protect their daughter from harm.
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-95458-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the...
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is pushed toward retirement.
It’s a great relief for Inspector Gamache to get out of the office and head for Three Pines to help therapist-turned-bookseller Myrna find out why her friend Constance Pineault didn’t turn up for Christmas. Except for Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s staff has been gutted by Chief Superintendent Francoeur. Gamache’s decisions have been mostly ignored and bets placed on how soon he’ll admit redundancy and retire. Even worse, a recent tragedy (The Beautiful Mystery, 2012, etc.) has led his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to transfer out of Gamache’s department, fall sway to prescription drugs and hold his former boss in contempt. En route to Three Pines, Gamache happens upon a fatality at the Champlain Bridge and agrees to handle the details. But this case takes a back seat to the disappearance of Constance when she turns up dead in her home. Myrna confides Constance’s secret: As the last surviving Ouellet quintuplet, she’d spent her adult years craving privacy after the national publicity surrounding the birth of the five sisters had turned them into daily newspaper fodder. Why would anyone want to murder this reclusive woman of 79? The answer is developed through clues worthy of Agatha Christie that Gamache interprets while dealing with the dismemberment of his homicide department by Francoeur, who’s been plotting a major insult to Canadian government for 30 years. Matters come to a head when Gamache and the one Sûreté chief still loyal to him and her husband, a computer whiz, are tracked to Three Pines, where Beauvoir awaits, gun in hand.
Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the real-life Dionne family debacle of the 1940s. But it’s Three Pines, with its quirky tenants, resident duck and luminous insights into trust and friendship, that will hook readers and keep them hooked.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-65547-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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