A pet portraitist digs right into a demise at a home occasion the place the
different visitors don’t deign to acknowledge the lifeless.
The goddaughter of Susie Mahl’s mom’s second cousin as soon as
eliminated (or one thing like that) connects the in any other case middle-class pet portraitist
to the flamboyant individuals of Norfolk. Though Susie isn’t a lot invested in
their stratospheric class or standing, her work is funded nearly solely by
their curiosity. The truth is, when her mom arranges for Susie to hitch a weekend
home occasion for eligible bachelor Archibald Barnabas Cooke Wellingham at
Fontaburn Corridor, Susie’s already within the space, having been commissioned to attract
six of Aidan McCann’s Nationwide Hunt–successful racehorses. She attends the occasion
with resignation, hoping to get some good tales for Toby Cropper, a pal
she had the great fortune of assembly at an earlier such occasion (A Brush
With Dying, 2018), and to drum up some enterprise. As anticipated, Archie’s
different visitors are upper-crust. They’ve little curiosity in Susie aside from the
irreverent Daniel Furr Egrant and American Hailey Dune, who appears as a lot an
outlier as Susie. Because the night time winds down in native ingesting video games, Susie
retires to her room till a home alarm rouses all of the visitors. All however one:
Hailey can’t be roused, and the occasion surmises that maybe she’d drunk sufficient
to kill her. (The embarrassment of all of it!) Susie isn’t offered on the
clarification, and an prolonged go to from Toby raises her hopes that the 2 can
dig into investigating Hailey’s sudden demise. However Toby’s keep doesn’t have the
romance-sparking, murder-solving taste she’d hoped for, particularly since he
appears to be getting awfully pleasant with flirtatious Lucy, Susie’s hostess in
the nation.
A Christie homage whose upper-crust humor targets readers who
acknowledge the variations between a rustic home and a stately dwelling.
