Murder at the Villa Byzantine

January 31, 2011
In Raichev's middling sixth contemporary evocation of golden age whodunits featuring private detective Maj. Hugh Payne and his wife, mystery writer Antonia Darcy (after 2010's The Curious Incident at Claridge's), the couple reluctantly attend a birthday party for actress Melisande Chevret. The guests, an array of improbable eccentrics, include Stella Markoff, a woman who used to work for the rightful heir to the Bulgarian throne. When Markoff is later decapitated with a sword in the Villa Byzantine, the London home of her collaborator in a biography of another member of the Bulgarian royal family, the case appears open and shut, but Payne and Darcy are determined to look further. A sluggish plot goes hand in hand with the author's failure to rise to the challenge of making modern characters act and talk like ones from the 1930s without veering into parody.