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A pet portraitist digs into a death at a house party where the
other guests do not deign to acknowledge the dead.
The goddaughter of Susie Mahl’s mother’s second cousin once
removed (or something like that) connects the otherwise middle-class pet portraitist
to the fancy people of Norfolk. Although Susie isn’t much invested in
their stratospheric class or status, her work is funded almost exclusively by
their interest. In fact, when her mother arranges for Susie to join a weekend
house party for eligible bachelor Archibald Barnabas Cooke Wellingham at
Fontaburn Hall, Susie’s already in the area, having been commissioned to draw
six of Aidan McCann’s National Hunt–winning racehorses. She attends the event
with resignation, hoping to get some good stories for Toby Cropper, a friend
she had the good fortune of meeting at an earlier such event (A Brush
With Death, 2018), and to drum up some business. As expected, Archie’s
other guests are upper-crust. They have little interest in Susie except for the
irreverent Daniel Furr Egrant and American Hailey Dune, who seems as much an
outlier as Susie. As the night winds down in local drinking games, Susie
retires to her room until a house alarm rouses all the guests. All but one:
Hailey can’t be roused, and the party surmises that perhaps she’d drunk enough
to kill her. (The embarrassment of it all!) Susie isn’t sold on the
explanation, and an extended visit from Toby raises her hopes that the two can
dig into investigating Hailey’s sudden death. But Toby’s stay doesn’t have the
romance-sparking, murder-solving flavor she’d hoped for, especially since he
seems to be getting awfully friendly with flirtatious Lucy, Susie’s hostess in
the country.
A Christie homage whose upper-crust humor targets readers who
recognize the differences between a country house and a stately home.
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