December 21, 2015
Dams’s delightful 17th Dorothy Martin mystery (after 2015’s The Gentle Art of Murder) takes the American schoolteacher and her retired policeman husband, Alan Nesbitt, to a police conference in Cambridge, England. While exploring (the fictitious) St. Stephen’s college in the historic town, Dorothy gets lost and winds up in a supposedly locked science lab, where she spots a pool of blood on the floor. When she returns with help, the floor is completely clean, and Alan questions whether Dorothy really saw anything amiss. A determined Dorothy persuades friendly local detectives to look into the matter, though it appears at first that the incident was a student prank involving a lab animal. When Dorothy’s snooping leads to a dirty scalpel that’s later proven to be covered in human blood, the plot thickens. Anglophiles will relish every aspect of St. Stephen’s and its gorgeous Cambridge surroundings. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron Agency.
February 1, 2016
While her husband attends a police conference at Cambridge University, Dorothy Martin explores a science building and discovers a pool of blood--but the blood is gone when she returns with help. A prank gone wrong? A failed experiment? The 19th entry (after The Gentle Art of Murder) continues the winning ways of this long-running series.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 15, 2015
Dorothy Martin, a retired schoolteacher living in England (she's married to a retired British cop), always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time. Of all the people who could have found blood on a floor in a university, it has to be Dorothy. And when she goes to find someone to take a look at the blood, it's gone by the time she returns to the room. If you're a regular reader of this always engaging series, you'll know Dorothy won't just shrug it off; she'll dig, pester, and follow the tiniest clues until she finds out why the blood was there, whose it was, and why someone would have cleaned it up. Dorothy is an immensely likable amateur sleuthalthough by now, after more than 15 books, she might as well hang out a shingle and turn proand the stories are intriguing, suspenseful enough to keep us turning pages but not so elaborate that we're tempted to give up in frustration. A new entry in this series is always welcome for fans of fictional amateur sleuths.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)