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Amendment of Life: A Mystery
 
 
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Amendment of Life: A Mystery [Hardcover]

Catherine Aird (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)


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Book Description

January 9, 2003
For decades, Catherine Aird’s crime novels featuring C.D. Sloan have been beloved by fans and lauded by critics for their adroit plotting, playful wit, and literate charm. With Amendment of Life, Aird delivers the lively and engrossing novel that readers have come to rely upon.

Detective Chief Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Calleshire CID is used to the occasional oddity in his relatively quiet part of the English countryside. But lately things have taken a strange turn. First, in the center of a yew maze that is the showpiece of the Tudor-era house, Aumerle Court, a body is spotted by Miss Daphne Pedlinge, the elderly chatelaine of the Court. By the time the groundskeeper actually makes it to the center, he, too, spies the body, and it is indeed dead.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, a slaughtered rabbit is left on the Bishop’s doorstep in nearby Calleford, an omen as portentous as the body in the maze. Now Inspector Sloan, with the somewhat trying personage of Constable Crosby in tow, must uncover what precisely is going on as they launch an investigation with more twists and turns than the maze itself.


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Last seen in Little Knell (2001), DI C.D. Sloan, "head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of `F' Division of the County of Calleshire Constabulary," looks into the murder of a woman found at the center of a Tudor-period maze. Catherine Aird's breezy Amendment of Life provides an intricate puzzle worthy of the always entertaining Inspector Sloan.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Aird's contemporary British cozies display excellent, engaging dialogue as well as plots handled with deft, no-nonsense trajectory. If Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan is less than a vivid presence, some of the other characters make up for it. In this one, it is the redoubtable Daphne Pedlinge. From her wheelchair on an upper floor of Aumerle Court, she keeps an eagle eye on the Tudor yew maze that folks pay to enter and wander in, and it is she who spots the body first. Meanwhile, David Collins, half of Double Felix, a lighting firm contracted to do sound and light for the maze as well as for the close of the bishop of Calleford, is supremely distracted by the illness of his small son. When the body in the maze turns out to be Mrs. Collins, Sloan works out a maze of his own through the charming bishop and his sensible wife, the sharp Miss Daphne, and the denizens of the Berebury Police Station. Nicely crafted and very winning. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (January 9, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0312290802
  • ISBN-13: 978-0312290801
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #187,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Murder in a maze!, March 21, 2004
This review is from: Amendment of Life: A Mystery (Hardcover)
Catherine Aird's longevity in the mystery writing genre is explained by this book. She's been writing her CD Sloan mysteries for years, and in this, her most recent addition to the series, she still has all her skills intact. She write mysteries that intelligent, erudite and slyly funny. In this one a body of a woman is found dead in front of a statue right smack in the middle of a maze. Sloan and Crosby first have to determine whether she died by her own hand or did someone else speed her to her death? Then they have to figure out how she could have been brought into the middle of this very difficult maze. And how do a dead rabbit and a missing goat from quite a few mile away tie in with their mystery? I am a huge fan of Catherine Aird, and this book is as elegant and mischievious as any of the the preceeding books in her Sloan/Crosby series.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Another problems arises with DNA testing!, August 24, 2005
This review is from: Amendment of Life: A Mystery (Hardcover)
I thought this book was literally 'made or written for me' since I work in a bioethics/disability group that deals with some of the more recent moral conundrums brought to the fore by biomedical practitioners. Usually we have a problem in that families want to euthanize their family member with a disability. It never occurred to me that DNA testing could show that one parent is not actually the parent of a disabled child! And then to have invasive surgery to keep from passing on the defective gene to more posterity...I really think the woman should have mentioned this before the 'father' had the surgery. Would have avoided all kinds of trouble...

I was in London about 20 years ago, and though I saw one of their famous mazes I never got the opportunity to lose myself in one of them. I would have liked that as a child, though I imagine it can get a bit claustrophobic. Poor Inspector Sloan seems to have a knack for having to deal with bored elderly in Britain...their boredom is usually relieved by sticking their noses where into his murder cases. Though in this case the woman could hardly avoid getting involved since it was her maze the woman was killed in, and she had a bird's eye view of the maze from the second story of her home. She is actually quite witty, and keeps Sloan on his toes trying to figure out how to get through the maze, and how the body of the young woman got into the maze with no obvious tracks or means of doing so.

Sloan continues to have to deal with his rather dense Constable who has a penchant for speed. And in the midst of all this is a small boy suffering from a genetic disorder, who in the end is left bearing all the suffering that the selfishness of the adults around him left him with. A truly sad possibility to our endeavors to learn more about our existence and the sciences involved in making us who we are.

Karen Sadler
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
"Toss you for it?" said Pete Carter. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
security lighting
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Detective Inspector Sloan, Miss Daphne, Aumerle Court, David Collins, Miss Pedlinge, Captain Prosser, Detective Constable Crosby, Daphne Pedlinge, Milly Smithers, Kenny Prickett, Double Felix, Margaret Collins, Pete Carter, Eric Paterson, Jeremy Prosser, Bevis Pedlinge, Barry Wright, Clerk of Works, Mary Wallingford, Bertram Wallingford, Sharon Gibbons, Superintendent Leeyes, Long Gallery, Staple St James, Amanda Pedlinge
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