There’s never a dull moment at the Vulcan, from the leading lady’s liaison to the harassment of an inadequate actress. But vanity and hysterics, suspicion and superstition, brandy and jealousy, are upstaged by a death on opening night.
Red-hot jazz meets cold-blooded murder. It’s lucky that Inspector Roderick Alleyn is in the audience. Now Alleyn must follow a confusing score that features a chorus of family and friends desperate to hide the truth and perhaps shelter a murderer in their midst.
Flossie Rubrick, a highly opinionated and influential Member of the New Zealand Parliament, was last seen heading off to one of the storage sheds on her sheep farm. Three weeks later, she turned up dead and packed in a bale of her own wool. What happened on the night of her disappearance?
With the notion of bringing together the most bitter of enemies for his own amusement, a bored, mischievous millionaire throws a house party. As a brutal snowstorm strands the unhappy guests, the party receives a most unwelcome visitor: death and Inspector Roderick Alleyn must step in to decipher who at the party is capable of cold-blooded murder…
A young New Zealander’s first contact with her English gentry friends in London is the body of Lord Wutherford – with a meat skewer through the eye. The Lampreys had hoped for cash from Uncle Gabriel, instead Chief Inspector Alleyn has to work out which of them killed him.
A cosy game of darts in a cosy English pub is going well until one of the players dies on the spot. Chief Inspector Alleyn knows it wasn’t the dart that killed him, but the prussic acid someone added to the cut.
It’s murder in the little English village, but the two local spinsters, Miss Campanula, the victim, and Miss Prentice, her friend who may have been the intended victim, are not exactly the beloved little old ladies of song and story. But could they have been sufficiently unpleasant to provoke a murderer?
The season had begun. Debutantes and chaperones were planning their luncheons, teas, dinners, balls. The blackmailer was planning his strategies, stalking his next victim. And a body is found in the back of a taxi.
What begins as a routine case turns out to be the most momentous of Roderick Alleyn’s career. For before he can corner the killer, his heart is captured by one of the suspects — the flashing-eyed painter Agatha Troy, who has nothing but scorn for Alleyn.
Death was served well-chilled and Inspector Roderick Alleyn must uncork this mystery and uncover a devious killer.