MURDER AT THE CHASE

A mystery writer and an assistant literary agent delve into crime in the country.

Donald Langham and his girlfriend, Maria Dupre, are at a garden party at his agent Charles Elder’s London town house when they meet Alasdair Endicott, the sickly son of manly mystery writer Edward Endicott, who’s just written his own first novel based on his experiences with ghosts. When Alasdair returns home to Humble Barton, Suffolk, to find Edward missing, he asks Donald, who’s worked as a detective, to come down. Donald and Maria, who have already booked a room at a nearby hotel, gladly come to Endicott’s Chase, where they meet former Hollywood star Caroline Dequincy, who’d like to be more than a friend to Edward. The police are called in when copious amounts of blood are found near the house. A walk in the woods with Caroline’s bloodhound turns up a body. It’s not Edward’s but that of a man who claimed to be the 150-year-old Victorian satanist Vivian Stafford, who’d recently held several séances at his former abode, Stafford Hall, now owned by the avant-garde artist Haverford Dent. When Edward appears, he claims to have been on a walking tour and to be shocked over the death of the man he had been researching for his next book. As Donald, Maria and the police struggle to discover who Stafford really is and why someone wanted him dead, tragedy strikes again when the Rev. Marcus Denbigh is killed by a giant orrery, the mechanical creation of Dent. Is it accident, suicide or murder?

Donald’s second mystery (Murder by the Book, 2013) takes place in 1955 but reads like a country-house whodunit from the golden age, packed with fascinating characters, each boasting a motive for murder.