Search results for ""felony mayhem""

Two-time Edgar nominee LC Tyler is best known for his series featuring Ethelred and Elsie - a third-rate novelist and his gloriously vulgar agent, respectively. And so he should be: He's twice won Britain's Last Laugh" award for the Best Humorous Mystery of the Year. But with A Cruel Necessity, the first in the John Grey series, Tyler takes a sharp turn into the shadows. There are still some chuckles to be had, but not many: This is England in the year 1657, Oliver Cromwell is in power, and joy has essentially been outlawed. A young lawyer with a taste for beer and pretty women, Grey finds pleasures enough, even in this backwater Essex town, but he'd be wise to keep his amusement to himself: A Royalist spy has been found dead in a local ditch, and Cromwell's agents are eager - distressingly eager - to explain to Grey that this is nothing to laugh about.

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Young Rena Austen, newly wed, is afraid she's made a terrible mistake. Her husband, once a dashingly romantic figure of a wounded war hero, has turned into a moody lay-about, and they are sharing a gloomy house on the Upper East Side of New York with his unpleasant, always-there family. When her husband reacts in a frighteningly angry way to Rena pulling a particular volume off the library shelf, she has had enough, and flees her home in fear for her life. Thankfully, Henry Gamadge is on hand to solve the mystery of the book and the dead body that inevitably turns up. This 1951 novel is, sadly, Gamadge's last appearance, but on the bright side he is as charming here as he was on his first outing.

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Ricky Alleyn - perhaps you know his father, Roderick? - first appeared in Spinsters in Jeopardy, as a child. He's now 21, and has taken himself off to a secluded island to write a novel. Or think about writing a novel. Or look for distractions so he can avoid writing a novel. The distractions abound, mostly in the form of colorful local characters (and a rather dishy one), so all is beer and skittles (well, except for the novel) until Ricky stumbles across a murder and then gets himself kidnapped. Which is too bad for Ricky (and the murder-victim), but dandy for the reader, as it brings Inspector Alleyn to the island, and he's on top form. A subtheme involving drug-running may strike a jarring note, but remember, Last Ditch was first published in 1977, and as such, it offers a remarkable look at what happens when the characters and conventions of the Golden Age fetch up in the distinctly tarnished present.

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We do love a man in a uniform, but the "Constables" in question are not policemen but paintings-the landscapes, specifically, of the 19th-century painter John Constable. Agatha Troy (the artist wife, you'll remember, of Inspector Alleyn) has a special fondness for Constable's work, so she jumps at the chance to take a river-cruise through "Constable Country" in the east of England. Her enthusiasm dims a little when it becomes clear that the ticket became available at the last minute only because a previous passenger was murdered in his cabin-and murdered, it seems, by a notorious international criminal known as the "Jampot." (How we long for the days when notorious international criminals had really cute names.)

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The elderly Emily Pride is perfectly pleased to have inherited an island, even if her starchy pragmatism is ever-so-faintly appalled by the "Pixie Falls" spring and its reported miraculous healing properties. But really, the locals' attempts to capitalize on the "miracles" are entirely too tacky-Ye Olde Gift Shoppe, the neon signs...not on Miss Emily's watch, thank you. Of course, the locals are not exactly thrilled to give up their trade (Pixie Falls may be merely be known for healing warts, it's true, but you take your shillings where you can find them). Could their frustration have bubbled up into murderous rage? Inspector Alleyn will have to sort it out. And this time, it's personal.

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Mary Bellamy is the sweetheart of the London stage, fluffy as only an elderly lady of 50(!) can be. Her fans and friends-and who didn't adore, positively adore darling Mary?-are heartbroken when somehow Mary manages to spritz herself not with her favorite perfume but with the deadly insecticide meant to be sprayed on the azaleas. Inspector Alleyn begins by smelling something fishy (everything he learns about lovely, fragile Mary suggests that in fact she was a rather vicious battleax), but he very quickly starts smelling something different...something like a rat.

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Pretty and popular, sixteen-year-old Mariah Ebinger is the typical American teen. Well, except for the weird dreams. And the helicopter phobia. And the—OK, this is pretty strange—the ability to speak Spanish. She’s, like, never even heard Spanish! But except for that stuff, totally typical. The terrible thing is that Rolando Carrera may be typical as well. His wife and daughter murdered by the death squads in Argentina’s “dirty war,” Carrera has crossed some terrible internal line. His grief, his rage…they have blended into a toxic cocktail of obsession with one single burning aim: Kill Mariah Ebinger.

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Daniel Valentine, a gay bartender, and his straight friend Clarisse Lovelace, a real estate agent, are the investigative duo of this set of four light mysteries set in Boston in the 1980s, all named after a color. In the first of these, Vermillion, the two investigate the murder of a 19-year old gay male hustler.

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With Adonis and Darling we are delighted to open the Robert Forsyth series, which was written primarily in the 1980s but carries all the flavors (er, flavours) that fans of British Golden Age mystery have come to expect.Forsyth himself—a brilliant young barrister forced to give up the law in response to a dreadful and undisclosed disgrace—is very much in the Wimsey mold, which is to say that solving crimes is his personal passion but by no means his bread and butter. And though Forsyth lacks a Lugg-like manservant, he does have an indispensable and devoted secretary who shares the spotlight as the series develops. Structurally, both Adonis and Darling nod very distinctly in the direction of the classics: Darling, in fact, is set during a country-house weekend! And for all that Giroux (pseudonym of Canadian writer Doris Shannon) was clearly steeped in the genre, the Forsyth series is no museum piece, managing the neat trick of being both charmingly vivid and delightfully well bred.

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Grad student Sarah Deane was on a birdwatching vacation in Texas when she discovered her true calling as the “Nancy Drew of the 1980s” (Publishers Weekly). In these two adventures, however, she's brought her eagle eye back home to Maine.The first stop is Bowmouth College, where Sarah, a newly minted teaching fellow, learns that some things may be even deadlier than academic infighting. One reviewer noted that he was “actually tempted to assign the book to grad students, so they'll know what they're getting themselves into.”Sarah's next port of call is in fact the water, as she and her boyfriend kick back on a swanky yacht in exchange for helping the oddball owner distribute Bibles to churches along the rocky coast. It's all smooth sailing until another passenger turns up dead, and Sarah realizes (with some terror and just a little sleuthly delight) that a death on a ship at sea is just a water-logged version of a locked-room mystery.

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The War is over, but only just, and San Francisco is still crammed with military uniforms. Of course, being San Francisco, it's also crammed with Bohemians (in a few years, they'll be known as Beatniks). Noel Bruce straddles both camps: By day she's a straight-laced driver for the Navy, but at night she lets her hair down and parties with her flamboyant art-school chums. The party comes to a screeching halt, however, when a dead body turns up in a sculptor's studio, and the artists discover that pretentious mannerisms and amusing facial hair provide little defense against the chill of fear. As in Skeleton Key, the heroine is a working woman, and, like all of Offord's novels, My True Love Lies provides an intriguing bridge between old-fashioned, 1930s-style plotting and a kind of feminism that feels startlingly up-to-date.

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As in her previous book, Grave Mistake, Ngaio Marsh offers up a lady of a certain age, high-strung and hyperventilating, two ticks short of neurosis. Photo Finish's dead diva, the soprano Isabella Sommita, was widely loathed, so much so that the problem is less a lack of plausible suspects than an embarrassment of options. Though the grand country-house - and with it, the country-house murder - was history by 1980, when Photo Finish was originally published, Dame Ngaio got around the problem by setting the story on a lavish island estate, cut off from the mainland by a sudden storm. Happily, Inspector Alleyn is among the guests, and can take charge in the coppers' absence. The penultimate book in the series, Photo Finish is also one of only four books set in Marsh's native New Zealand. It's nice to think that she came home at the end.

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A collection of short stories written by Ngaio Marsh; a number of them feature Inspector Alleyn, the protagonist of Marsh's famous mystery series. Included as well is a television script written by Marsh and the very first short story Marsh ever published.

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"You don't believe me, do you?" asked Henry. "That I might have killed somebody." Well, really. The genuine murderer-the real pro-tends to keep track of that sort of thing. And he wasn't dressed for murder. The tweed jacket, the checked waistcoat, and above all the yellow bow tie...they would have enabled Henry to audition as an extra in a 50s costume drama-a dodgy bookmaker, say, or a ne'er-do-well younger brother destined for exile to one of the more obscure colonies. They were not clothes that you would risk wearing for a murder. Which is fine, since there isn't actually a body. And yet there are an awful lot of red herrings, just begging to be pawed through by the hapless Ethelred and Elsie, his chocolate-chomping agent. The funniest Herring yet in this deliciously giggly, Edgar-nominated series.

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There will always be an England, and in the world of traditional crime fiction, there will always be an Upper Quintern, the sort of Little English Village that is home mostly to the very rich and the servants who make their lives delightful. But Sybil Foster's life is not delightful, even if she does have an extremely talented gardener. Exhausted from her various family stresses - a daughter, for instance, who wants to marry a man without a title! - Sybil takes herself off to a local hotel that specializes in soothing shattered nerves. When she's killed, Inspector Alleyn has a real puzzler on his hands: Yes, she was silly, snobbish, and irritating. But if that were enough motive for murder, half of England would be six feet under.

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