Crisp dialogue and just enough London mise-en-scène give Macdonald a leg up on her competitors in the...
The sixth in a series (Road Kill, 2000, etc.) by Britisher Macdonald.
Timothy Curwen was always a steady if somewhat overdressed customer, so antiquarian bookseller Dido Hoare doesn’t like it one bit when he takes a swan dive off his balcony. Especially not when the check for his last purchase, Dickens’s The Haunted Man, bounces. His solicitors at Price Rankin Burke are apologetic, sending assistant Dona Helmer to escort Dido to Tim’s flat in Marylebone in hope of retrieving the Dickens and offering her a handsome sum to appraise his collection. But Dido is shocked to find nothing of any value in the bookcases of the fifth-floor flat. She does find Smith and Waites, two officers from the Seymour Street station whose scene-of-crime demeanor leads her to suspect that Tim’s leap wasn’t exactly voluntary. Her suspicions are fed as she follows the efforts of crime reporter Christopher Kennedy to track down Curwen’s missing collectibles and to trace his equally elusive sister, Theresa Clark. Leaving her three-year-old son Ben with her father Barnabas, Dido goes undercover along with her sometime boyfriend, DI Paul Grant, trawling the pubs of Hackney in hope of catching a glimpse of the shadowy Theresa. Instead, she runs into Kennedy, and, ricocheting between the two men, threads her way through a web of deceit even denser than the shelves in her well-stocked shop.
Crisp dialogue and just enough London mise-en-scène give Macdonald a leg up on her competitors in the single-heroine-with-too-many-boyfriends genre—although the main twist in this plot is obvious all the way from Russell Square.Pub Date: June 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28360-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.
Too much free time leads a New Hampshire bookseller into yet another case of murder.
Now that Tricia Miles has Pixie Poe and Mr. Everett practically running her bookstore, Haven’t Got a Clue, she finds herself at loose ends. Her wealthy sister, Angelica, who in the guise of Nigela Ricita has invested heavily in making Stoneham a bookish tourist attraction, is entering the amateur competition for the Great Booktown Bake-Off. So Tricia, who’s recently taken up baking as a hobby, decides to join her and spends a lot of time looking for the perfect cupcake recipe. A visit to another bookstore leaves Tricia witnessing a nasty argument between owner Joyce Widman and next-door neighbor Vera Olson over the trimming of tree branches that hang over Joyce’s yard—also overheard by new town police officer Cindy Pearson. After Tricia accepts Joyce’s offer of some produce from her garden, they find Vera skewered by a pitchfork, and when Police Chief Grant Baker arrives, Joyce is his obvious suspect. Ever since Tricia moved to Stoneham, the homicide rate has skyrocketed (Poisoned Pages, 2018, etc.), and her history with Baker is fraught. She’s also become suspicious about the activities at Pets-A-Plenty, the animal shelter where Vera was a dedicated volunteer. Tricia’s offered her expertise to the board, but president Toby Kingston has been less than welcoming. With nothing but baking on her calendar, Tricia has plenty of time to investigate both the murder and her vague suspicions about the shelter. Plenty of small-town friendships and rivalries emerge in her quest for the truth.
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0272-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
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