Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his Thames River Valley team return to investigate a series of violent events, culminating in murder, that surround an elderly bachelor trying to pick an heir from among members of his assembled family.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A self-reflective conceit marks Curzon's ninth British police procedural featuring Superintendent Mike Yeadings. The tale, which is peopled by characters who belong, observes constable Rosemary Zyczynski, to "body-in-the-library crime fiction," is ill-served by a threadbare, suspenseless plot of inheritance and adultery. Nonagenarian Hadrian Bascombe summons his possible heirs to say that he will leave his fortune to only one of them. Immediately afterwards, the two youngest, cousins Dominic and Francine, are injured in a suspicious car accident. Soon other family members die off--one is electrocuted in his orchid hothouse, another is pushed under a tube train--in what looks like a tontine. Tangled rumors of incest unravel to expose an ornate, incredible conclusion.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Yet another dysfunctional family's problems descend on Thames Valley Police Force Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his stalwart team (First Wife, Twice Removed, 1993). And the relatives of eccentric, ailing old bachelor Hadrian Bascombe are an odd lot indeed: slightly crippled but feisty Francine; her still beautiful, promiscuous mother, Elinor, married to dermatologist Frank; Elinor's sweet-natured brother Josh, a botanist-photographer; Elinor's businessman brother Morton and his avaricious wife, Marcia. Morton's son Dominic is driving as he and Francine, in her car, make their getaway from a meeting of the clan called by Bascombe to announce a single heir to his fortune. (He never does.) There's a near-fatal accident, and Yeadings spots deliberate damage to the car. That's just the start of a slow-to-unravel history awash with death and deception in which Yeadings confronts Josh's murder and, with Francine, echoes of his own long-ago emotional turmoil. Its manipulative machinery begins to clank well before the finish, but this literate police procedural is moderately absorbing most of the way. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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