The Colours of Murder

June 15, 2019
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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July 1, 2019
In British author Carter’s middling sequel to 2018’s A Brush with Death, which introduced animal portraitist Susie Mahl, Archibald Wellingham invites his old and titled friends to a weekend party at his Norfolk country house. Needing an extra woman to even up the numbers, Archie invites Susie after hearing she’s attractive and in the area drawing racehorses. The only other guest who isn’t a member of the idle rich is Archie’s new acquaintance, exuberant American Hailey Dune. In the wee hours of the morning, the burglar alarm goes off. The awakened guests find no intruder, but do discover Hailey dead in her bed. The police are content to deem her death to be from natural causes; Susie disagrees. Acting largely on feelings and conjectures, she pulls tiny pieces of the puzzle together before turning things over to nice Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds, who says that “Susie makes a fine amateur detective.” The book starts slowly as Carter introduces the guests and muses at length on their manners, then continues along in fits and starts to its undramatic conclusion. This will appeal more to dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles than mystery lovers.