One inheritance plus two heirs adds up to murder in a Golden Age-style mystery that critics say is "reminiscent of Dame Agatha Christie."
Nice old Helen Lovelace has passed on to her just reward, so it's not surprising that her two young heirs have arrived to pick up the tasty inheritance that they expect to split. What is perhaps surprising is that their arrival is followed by another death: one of the heirs is murdered in her bed, and her cousin, Nicholas, looks a good bet for having pulled the trigger.
Mrs. Lovelace's housekeeper, however, has long had a soft spot for Nicholas, and she implores a neighbor--Virginia Freer, as it happens--to poke around and perhaps find another suspect. Virginia, happy to help, calls in her secret weapon: Her former husband, Felix, may be a bounder, a cad, a liar, and a thief, but he does have a knack for finding bad guys.
Series
Language
Place of publication
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-1-63194-348-5 (9781631943485)
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Schweitzer Classification
Morna Doris MacTaggart (E.X. Ferrars) was born in Burma in 1907 and sent at the age of six to a prestigious boarding school in England. After an early marriage and the publication of two novels, in 1940 her life was turned upside-down when she both met Robert Brown and published Give a Corpse a Bad Name (as E.X. Ferrars), her first mystery and the first in what would become the five-book "Toby Dyke" series. She and Brown married in 1945 and in 1951 moved to the US, though they returned to the UK only a year later, sickened by America's turn toward McCarthyism. In 1953 Ferrars helped found the Crime Writers' Association. The couple lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, during which Ferrars wrote more than 35 crime novels, finally returning to series mystery--first with the "Virginia and Alex Freer" books and then with "Andrew Basnett"--in the late 1970s, after a move to Oxfordshire. She died in 1995, having published more than 75 novels and numerous short stories, nearly all of them involving dead bodies.
