Search Results for: margarets,-the

As always, Jesse Falkenstein and Sergeant Clock have a score of cases on their hands, but Jesse is mainly interested in the murder of Margaret Brandon, a trance medium. He was her lawyer and liked her, and someone had gone to great efforts to make her death seem accidental.

But with so many suspects – the egocentric writer, the young lout, the nephew in line for an inheritance – both Falkenstein and Clock are at their wit’s end until their old acquaintance Mr Walker sends his comments from Hawaii – which might be just what they need to get a lead . . .

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

‘A touch of Margaret Millar . . . worth watching’ Sunday Telegraph

Sculptress Katharine Craig doesn’t often get to Lake Tahoe, where she stays with her cousin, Jon Craig. This time, though, Katharine arrives just in time to be swept into a whirl of parties, mystery… and murder.

A series of art thefts has the townsfolk doing plenty of speculating and Cousin Jon is right at the centre of the mystery. But when a local art collector is found gruesomely impaled on the piece of sculpture he recently had shown to Katharine, idle speculation turns to serious investigation. It seems Katharine was the last person to see the victim alive, and Kevin Bryce of the Tahoe Police has a more than passing interest in getting to know her better…

The enormously wealthy Durie family occupies a gigantic baroque turn-of-the-century mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The family, whose fortune was established in Colonial times, is traditionally shy of all public notice and proud that no scandal has ever touched its name.

Newly married Michael and Amy Lloyd, bright young teachers in a private school, suddenly find themselves unemployed and apparently unemployable. When all cash and credit are gone, Michael and Amy decide to take up positions on the Durie household staff. But as the Lloyds learn to cope with their positions as servants they slowly become aware that the seventy-year-old matriarch Margaret Durie is, for her own unexplained reasons, enlisting them as her helpless accomplices in a subtly designed series of events that will ultimately lead to a thunderous scandal … and a ghastly death.

‘All le Guin’s stories are metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one’ Margaret Atwood

ARMCHAIR TRAVEL FOR THE MIND:

It was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes – literally. With a kind of a twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes … and on the way back from her sister’s wedding, she missed her plane in Chicago and found herself in Choom.

The author, armed with this knowledge and Rornan’s invaluable Handy Planetary Guide – although not the Encyclopedia Planeria, as that runs to forty-four volumes – has spent many happy years exploring places as diverse as Islac and the Veksian plane.

CHANGING PLANES is an intriguing, enticing mixture of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS and THE HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY; a cross between Douglas Adams and Alain de Botton: a mix of satire, cynicism and humour by one of the world’s best writers.