Fall of a Philanderer

July 18, 2005
When the delightful Daisy Fletcher, née Dalrymple, and her husband, DCI Alec Fletcher, discover the corpse of a local innkeeper at the shore while on summer holiday, they realize their vacation will have to be given over to sleuthing. Who killed George Enderby? Was it the husband or father of one of the many women with whom he had an affair? Was it an enigmatic schoolteacher, also on vacation in Westcombe? The setting—English seaside, a town that begins with the letter "W" and ends in "-combe," in the years after the Great War—will draw inevitable comparisons to Dorothy Sayers's Have His Carcase
(even the cover illustration recalls the iconic image of Harriet Vane in her flapper dress waltzing along the beach), but Dunn's 14th Daisy Dalrymple mystery is neither as witty nor as multilayered as Carcase
. And a somewhat anticlimactic ending may leave readers a little dissatisfied. Agent, Alice Volpe at Northwest Literary Agency
.