Nadia May
61) Miss Mapp
62) On war
A man dies with his hand on a radio dial. A disguised aristocrat finds murder at the opening night of a play. A cryptogram produces death in an English churchyard. These are just a few of the situations that confront Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn who, with his lovely wife Agatha Troy, charmed his way through more than thirty novels. Many other colorful characters created by Ngaio Marsh appear throughout this collection as well.
...A late spring in 1142 has the monks of Shrewsbury Abbey dismayed, for there may be no roses by June 22. For three years, wealthy young widow Judith Perle has rented her house to the monks for the price of a single white rose each year, in honor of her late husband. When nature finally complies, a pious monk is sent to pay the rent—and found murdered beside the hacked rosebush.
Without a rose, the monks' rental contract becomes void,
...65) The Bachelors
A barrister, a "priest," a detective, a lovelorn Irishman, a handwriting expert, a heinous spiritual medium…the very British bachelors of Muriel Spark's supreme 1960 novel come in every stripe. First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs and shopping at Fortnum's, the cozy bachelors are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented—defrauded, stolen from, blackmailed, or pressed to attend horrid séances—and
...The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the unsolved murder of another Englishwoman, a governess, ten years before. A magistrate in the new secular courts, Kamil Pasha, sets out to find the killer, but his dispassionate belief in science and modernity is shaken by betrayal and widening danger. In a lush, mystical voice, a young Muslim woman
...