Death of a Cozy Writer

Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a famous mystery writer (there are several nods to Agatha Christie here - e.g., Sir Adrian publishes a new novel every Christmas, just like "a Christie for Christmas" was marketed heavily by Christie's publisher for decades). Sir Adrian is possessed of an enormous country house and estate, a vast fortune, and an evil disposition; for years he tormented his children, first in the family household, but now that they're adults and living elsewhere, by changing his will on a monthly basis, always disinheriting someone in rotation. He calls his children back to the ancestral acres (okay, he is the first generation to own the estate) with the surprise announcement that he is engaged. The children rush to attend, hoping to talk the old goat out of remarrying (and diverting all of his money to his new spouse). Everybody, including the new fiancee and servants, have a motive to kill Sir Adrian. Surprise! Within hours, someone is killed (I won't spoil it and say who, but it isn't Sir Adrian). Here starts the classic locked-room mystery. Many clues gradually unfold, and additional goings-on occur to deepen the puzzle. Because of the freshly, and undisturbed, fallen snow, the murderer simply could not have come from the outside. Overall, this is a well-plotted and well-written mystery. If you like the classic, British, locked-room mystery, you will like this book. This author is a real find!

Besides the laugh-out-loud quality of the prose, biggest surprise of all - just when you think the story seems predictable, there are enough twists and turns (of the best kind) to satisfy the most critical reader....Can't wait for the next one!

G.M. Malliet's Death of a Cozy Writer is a good old-fashioned British drawing room mystery. The ill-fated writer of the book's title is Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk, whose best-selling series of Miss Rampling mysteries has left him rolling in pounds. Sir Adrian's favorite sport is altering his will, disinheriting one or another of his four children in response to real or perceived slights, or for exhibiting questionable taste, among innumerable other possible offenses--torturing them by playing a sort of Russian roulette with their inheritances. Eager to see them all squirm simultaneously and in close quarters, he invites his brood to Waverly Court, Adrian's 18th-century estate in Cambridgeshire, to celebrate his impending nuptials to a woman all four assume will be a British version of Anna Nicole Smith. The invitations prompt the expected amount of shock and complaint. The get-together itself proves to be murderous. Death of a Cozy Writer is the first in a new series featuring Detective Chief Inspector St. Just of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary and Sergeant Fear. The crime-fighting pair are not introduced, however, until we are some one hundred pages into the book, after a crime has been committed. And when St. Just and Fear do appear we are not told that much about them. Some details emerge: Fear has a daughter; St. Just has a cat aptly named Deerstalker. But while the other characters in the book are described in great detail--the malevolent Sir Adrian and his scheming brood, the help at Waverly Court--the detectives themselves are not fleshed out. This seems odd, as it is St. Just and his right-hand man who will have to anchor the series as its recurring characters, long after the Beauclerk-Fisks have been left on their own to run through their inheritances. It is interesting that the author has elected to breathe life into characters who will (presumably) be replaced in subsequent outings rather than beefing up her portrayal of St. Just. Malliet's writing is lovely: "Natasha admired the woman's self-possession. It was an excellent impersonation of aristocracy putting the revolting masses back in their place. Natasha, who had done her own research, found the act nearly pitch-perfect--for an act it was, she was certain. She wouldn't have put it past Lillian to have arrived at breakfast dressed in jodhpurs, cracking a whip against her highly polished boots, despite the absence of a stables for forty miles or more. Instead, Lillian had opted for the simple wool sheath bedecked with a king's ransom in pearls at neck and wrist: the uniform of the bored society matron. But not, Natasha recognized, quite the done thing for breakfast in a country manor house." And the mystery certainly kept me guessing until all was revealed in the requisite drawing room scene at the book's end. (I am left confused about one issue I should have liked tied up, though, having to do with the identity of Sir Adrian's secretary.) All in all a delightful read. I look fo

G.M. Malliet is a professional journalist and copywriter with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. DEATH OF A COPYWRITER is her first mystery and has already garnered the Malice Domestic Grant and the Romance Writers of America 2006 Stiletto Award in the thriller category. Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is as phony as his title. He has also produced one of the truly great dysfunctional families. He is ensconced in his eighteenth-century Cambridgeshire manor, and has married a woman who was accused of murdering her first husband for his money. He delights in using Violet to torment his grown-up children, all of whom have their own foibles. The result naturally turns to murder, and it is up to Detective Chief Inspector St. Just and his sidekick, Detective Sergeant Fear, from the Cambridgeshire Constabulary to sort out the mess. The servants also have their own secrets to cover up, and the result is a jolly investigation marked by hilarious dialogue and commentary: "The poor bugger really was dead, and he'd been dead awhile. St. Just thought it was little wonder the man who said he was his brother was in such sad shape. The body in the wine refrigerator or whatever it was called was a mess, the skull thoroughly crushed in. The face, itself, however, was intact: In profile, it retained the aristocratic, pampered visage of what the coroner would undoubtedly describe was a well-nourished, middle-aged man." Malliet writes this little "cozy" with a sense of humor and an eye towards thoroughly confusing the reader. The connections made by St. Just are nothing short of Sherlock Holmes at his most coherent. Malliet is not unaware of the perils of alcoholism to the family unit, and she uses this as a vehicle to produce the family secrets that would otherwise emerge as far-fetched. But in Ms. Malliet's able writing, it all makes a sordid type of sense. The result is a page-turner that is both entertaining and exhilarating. A most excellent first mystery! Shelley Glodowski Senior Reviewer