Greedy relatives and scheming servants come to battle over the will of a cantankerous old tycoon, as he lies on his deathbed and later in his tomb, where he may have been placed prematurely.
Cadbury's Coffin
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Edgar award nominee for best juvenile mystery, 1982,
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This review is from: Cadbury's Coffin (Hardcover)
"Convincing mystery stories for young adults, featuring young adults as protagonists, are as hard as proverbial hen's teeth to find. So the Swarthouts' new mystery, written with a dramatic Victorian flavor and laced with a subtle humor, is a welcome addition to library shelves...The denouement is impressive. More than a tidy wrap-up of a mystery story's odds and ends, it becomes a multi-layered statement about the ironies of life, the enigmatic nature of human relationships, and the bittersweet passage from adolescence into adulthood." Boston Globe
"Being buried alive so concerns old Lycurgus Cadbury that his custom-built coffin is equipped with a speaking tube, a summoning bell and springs to raise the lid and elevate the body. And buried alive he is -- at his own secret request -- so he can observe his heirs scheme and squabble during the three days before his will is read. But in an ironic twist, revealed after 175 entertaining and expertly written pages of Cadbury's Coffin, the stingy tycoon dies due to natural causes. Slick caricatures of a 19th century miser, his greedy relatives and humble servants were created by Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout...Victorian expressions color the prose, which boasts some of the most adroit scene-setting and descriptive narration available in fiction for older children today. Suspense mounts in well-paced episodes containing both horror and humor." Barbara Pierce, Poughkeepsie, New York Journal "Ruthless relatives, despicable deeds, ingenuous innocents, and rumors of rich rewards propel the amusing narrative, which sports a Victorian setting and style as well as the themes of love, death, and an inheritance. Part farce, part melodrama, and part mystery, the book contains conventions of all three--but with some clever twists. Stingy, self-made millionaire Lycurgus Cadbury-- whose fate it is to die or be murdered in nearly every other chapter--leaves his heirs pondering such dilemmas as: When is he 'thoroughly deceased?" and "how could one murder a dead man?"...The plot turns on two hoaxes; one is perpetrated on the characters, and the other on the reader, who ultimately discovers that this frivolous concoction masks a real mystery and an important idea." Nancy C. Hammond, the Horn Book Magazine "Here's a book filled with conflict between relatives and servants with bone-chilling surprises from cover to cover." Richmond, Virginia Times Dispatch
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