From Amazon.com
If Noel Coward or P.G. Wodehouse wrote mysteries, they would probably be very much like the books that Charlotte MacLeod writes, featuring the charming art detective Max Bittersohn and his socially connected wife, Sarah Kelling. There would be lots of style and witty dialogue, people with names like Tweeters Arbuthnot and Calpurnia Zickery, but not much meaty content.
MacLeod's latest mystery meringue begins at a fancy Boston wedding staged by Sarah for Max's nephew, where missing rubies, long-lost neighbors, the crash of a hot air balloon, and the discovery of a dead body are last-minute additions to the festivities. Things go downhill from there, with smoke bombs going off, more corpses piling up, and both Max and his 3-year-old son, Davy, soon among the missing. This is the kind of book that requires a dozen pages in the last chapter to explain everything, and that should be read with little finger firmly extended. Fans of Poirot, and of Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles, will be delighted. --Dick Adler
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In this spritely addition (after Odd Job) to a spirited series, MacLeod, who also writes the Peter Shandy novels (Exit the Milkman), has Sarah Kelling attempt to orchestrate an elegant wedding on Boston's North Shore for the nephew of her husband, art detective Max Bittersohn. Anyone planning a wedding should expect problems, but Sarah gets more than her fair share. Max is perplexed when the Kellings' fabulous rubies, last spotted in Amsterdam, suddenly appear among the wedding gifts. As he searches the room to find clues regarding their unorthodox reappearance, he stumbles across a verbose, mendacious burglar who serves him a brutal whack across the legs and then escapes. Shortly thereafter, a hot-air balloon crash lands in the middle of the wedding tent, and the Zickerys, long-lost neighbors of the Kellings, stumble out. The next day, after being incapacitated by a smoke bomb, Max is stunned to learn that a dead body has been found under the remains of the tent. Amid the screwball chaos, Max and Sarah, hampered by their three-year-old son Davy ("the world's most intelligent child"), try to discover who the dead man was, how his body came to be on their property and whether he has anything to do with the rubies, the thief or the smoke bomb. When Davy goes missing and then Max is abducted, level-headed Sarah must stave off her zany Kelling relatives to get her loved ones back. In this delightful mystery, Max and Sarah make a strong claim to being the Nick and Nora Charles of the 1990s, urbane, witty and thoroughly appealing. Mystery Guild main selection.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
