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ALIBI FOR A CORPSE by Elizabeth Lemarchand

ALIBI FOR A CORPSE

By

Pub Date: Feb. 15th, 1986
Publisher: Walker

A convoluted puzzle on the English moors for Scotland Yard's imaginative Detective Superintendent Tom Pollard and efficient sidekick Sergeant Toye (The Wheel Turns, Death of an old Girl, etc.). A year-old skeleton has been found in an abandoned-car dump on a comer of Reg Bickley's farm. Pollard's clever reasoning and dogged sleuthing produce a likely identification--drifter Steven Mullins--almost out of thin air. Bickley admits he once thrashed Mullins, but other locals are suspiciously unforthcoming--witchlike Sybil Pendine; bird-watching, truculent recluse Henry Stobart; and newly arrived Derek Wainwright. Eventually, though, Pollard makes a connection to the identification of one of the victims of a landslide in the vicinity a year before, and the proof needed in a case rife with speculation is produced in a trap for the murderer. Steady, slow and sturdy, short of resonance and sparkle, this one's strictly for fans of the British traditional, but, still, it's better than average for its kind.