From Publishers Weekly
Dr. Gerald Ashenden, "Ireland's justly famous thoracic surgeon," is lucky to escape with only a broken shoulder after being trampled by his gray stallion, Thor, ridden by his pregnant granddaughter, Rowena Keegan, in this nominal cozy marred by clumsy, overheated dialogue ("That murderous attack on Gerald! Oh, no, Inspector! I did nothing of the kind!"), short, choppy chapters (81 in all) and improbable detail (a "glass-fronted" police station). Rowena's plucky American friend, language expert Torrey Tunet, is sure Rowena didn't run down her grandfather deliberately. But when someone shoots Thor with the tip of a knitting needle, causing the horse to throw Ashenden to his death, Torrey has her work cut out to prove Rowena's innocence. In her hunt for the real murderer, Torrey discovers that the doctor had a few skeletons in the closet: a blackmailing grandson, a jilted Danish girlfriend and a plot to induce abortion through an overdose of X-rays. Will Rowena get an abortion? Who's the father? Could it be a case of incest? Such questions as these generate some tension and suspense, but Deere, author of one previous mystery (The Irish Cottage Murder), has yet to learn how to convinceAat the climax, the police gather a bunch of suspects together and question them as a group. The revelation that the killer used a child's popgun to shoot Thor with the knitting needle is the final absurdity, while the reason Thor attacked his master remains a mystery. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Torrey Tunet speaks a dozen languages and has a contract for children's books in three of them. She's fallen in love with a cottage in Ballynagh and set herself up there with a laptop on a card table and a fire in the grate. Then her pregnant friend Rowena is accused of killing her beloved grandfather, a local doctor. Rowena's family and the manor house where they live are dark with secrets. Everyone in this Irish cozy seems to act under a slightly sinister shadow: no one is ever what they seem, even Romanian American Torrey herself and her handsome boyfriend Jasper--a great cook and possibly a greater dissembler. Between Jasper's fabulous meals, Guinness and tea at the local pub, and the accretion of generations of local gossip, Torrey unwraps layer after layer of various kinds of truth and even manages to get her writing done. Interesting characters keep one moving through the labyrinthine plot, and the local color is the green and silvered gray of Ireland.
GraceAnne A. DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
