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THE SOUVENIR by Patricia Carlon

THE SOUVENIR

by Patricia Carlon

Pub Date: Jan. 25th, 1996
ISBN: 1-56947-048-0
Publisher: Soho

Four years ago, two 16-year-old girls, strangers to each other, joined together to hitchhike across Australia. One of them—was it mocking Peta Squire or shy Sandra Kilby?—filched a pillbox from one of their rides, unaware at first how dangerous the capsules inside could be. And when the game of musical pills was over, Marion Burton's brother Jack was dead (and not by poison). Now Marion, yearning to marry Peta's stepbrother, comes to quiet puzzle-solver Jefferson Shields and asks whether he can succeed where the police failed. The mystery that unfolds backward and forward in time is remarkable for asking not only whodunit, but what clues are available—what Shields can find that everyone else overlooked. Here, in a mystery first published in the UK in 1970, Australian writer Carlon (See Nothing . . . Say Nothing, 1968, etc.) presents a cunningly understated puzzle with a particularly deft solution.