A classic English mystery with plenty of unexpected plot twists.
A British detective battles to unmask a killer before his wife becomes victim No. 6.
Donald Langham and his French wife, Maria, are in the middle of buying a cottage in Suffolk when Maria arrives at the office with a bizarre invitation to attend a death at the home of Maxwell Falwell Fenton. When she was just 18, Maria was infatuated with the much older artist until he asked her to pose nude and she fought him off with a poker. The couple drive to Fenton’s crumbling estate to find that actress Holly Beckwith, George Goudge and his art critic wife, Hermione, poet Crispin Proudfoot, and Dr. Bryce are fellow invitees. Greeted by a butler, they each take numbered seats and are allowed to see Fenton, who is dying and almost unrecognizable. After excoriating and threatening them, he shoots himself. It seems like a simple suicide until the guests begin to be murdered in horrific ways in the order of their seat numbers. A call from DI Mallory, who finds the hanging death of Dr. Bryce fishy, involves Langham and Ralph Ryland, the partner in his detective agency, in a grim effort to halt the slaughter. As each guest is killed, Langham tries to protect the survivors while digging into Fenton’s thoroughly reprehensible past for clues.
A classic English mystery with plenty of unexpected plot twists.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9077-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sharply drawn characters, a “locked-room” location, and a tension-filled WWII setting illuminate this wartime thriller.
During World War II, a female police officer investigates a spate of murders on a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Oren’s novel opens arrestingly with a local police captain discovering a fisherman’s unexpected catch of a human body. Then, an initial assessment of death by drowning goes distinctly south when it turns out that the man was strangled. Things only get trickier from there since it’s wartime, 1944, and the corpse is that of a prisoner of war: The island, along with its docks, trawlers, and cranberry bogs, includes a prison camp of Italian POWs and a U.S. military emplacement headed by a lieutenant who’d prefer to be on the front lines (his wealthy family ensures that he’s not). To complicate matters further—especially when another murder victim emerges—the police captain is Mary Beth Swann, who took over her husband’s law enforcement role when he shipped out to the South Pacific. Being a female police officer was already challenging enough; Mary Beth, originally from Boston, also has to tolerate the disrespect of the island’s inhabitants. What elevates this intriguing story—comparisons with television’s always engaging Foyle’s War are inevitable—are the wonderfully delineated specifics of the location and characters. This island may be fictional, but it’s drawn directly from the author’s experiences on Nantucket, and each of the characters sparkles with their own vitality, including the town’s brothel madam, the Acadian short-order cook missing two fingers, a visiting gangster, and the nearly 90 Italians waiting out the war in a remote corner of a foreign land.
Sharply drawn characters, a “locked-room” location, and a tension-filled WWII setting illuminate this wartime thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950539-60-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Armstrong’s new twist on her Rockton franchise scores higher as wilderness adventure than as mystery.
The idealistic attempt to carve a new town out of the Yukon snow runs into criminal complications that threaten to reduce the tiny population to zero.
Det. Casey Butler has every reason to be deeply invested in Haven’s Rock. She and her husband, Rockton Sheriff Eric Dalton, have financed the new settlement, breaking away from the marginally more established refuge of Rockton, with money Casey inherited. Her eventful history with Rockton makes her eager for the new town, whose every resident will be hand-picked by Dalton and her, to succeed. So she’s alarmed to learn that three of those residents ignored the place’s paramount rule—don’t go into the forest—and only one of them returned. Yolanda the contractor, last spotted walking into the woods with Bruno the engineer, is back safe and sound, but finding Bruno will become the top priority of Casey and Dalton and their canine and human cohort. Soon after he’s rescued, Bruno goes AWOL from his hospital bed without more than hinting at what happened in the forest, and this time he turns up dead. Even worse, Penny, the architect who followed Yolanda and Bruno when she first saw them walking away from the town in progress, remains missing, presumed dead—until Casey and Dalton find a dead woman who turns out to be Denise, the second wife of Mark, a prospective resident who’s on a secret mission of his own. Few readers will be able to name any of the suspects an hour after putting this spinoff down, but they’ll still be shivering with cold.
Armstrong’s new twist on her Rockton franchise scores higher as wilderness adventure than as mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781250865410
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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