MURDER BY NUMBERS
by Eric Brown
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.