1990 cozy American detective fiction; ninth of MacLeod's novels of
Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn.
Sarah's Aunt Emma steps in for an ailing friend to play hostess on a
private island off the Maine coast, to a party of treasure-hunters who
may also harbour criminals.
And indeed this book is told from the viewpoint of Aunt Emma,
previously encountered as the best thing in The Plain Old Man; Max
and Sarah appear only in some very brief phone calls, though their
friend Theonia is brought in to provide a bit of support.
"Standard fortune-telling technique. I'm sure you could have done as
well if you hadn't led such a respectable life."
"Don't be a snob, Theonia. If you don't mind, I prefer to go on
thinking of you as omniscient. It makes me feel somewhat less
uncomfortable about the spot I'm in."
"Then by all means revere me as much as you like. I don't mind a
bit."
Emma's luggage includes a Gladstone bag full of stage jewellery that
she's planning to repair, and it's first stolen, then returned to her
with an addition, then stolen again; clearly something dodgy is going
on, even before a body shows up and people start getting hit on the
head (without lasting effect, because it's that kind of story).
There's a lot of maundering about how entirely without sense or style
young people are, and as usual very little in the way of hard evidence
with which one can solve the puzzle, though it's more amenable to
logic than many of MacLeod's books have been.
She wondered if the no doubt self-styled count was really planning
to write a book. Why shouldn't he be? Most people were, and far too
many of them did.
The dénouement is perhaps a bit sudden – Emma says "I can explain
everything" and is promptly hit on the head again, whereas one might
think the murderer would wait and see whether the explanation would
point at them – but it more or less works.
There's very little to this; more clearly than most, it's an attempt
to resurrect the between-wars English cosy novel in a setting full of
the Way Things Have Always Been Done, but while that's inevitably a
failure what's left is an effective short piece that gets its job done
and doesn't have too much extraneous material. Followed by The
Resurrection Man.
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