REVIEW
Deadly Legacy
by Betty Rowlands
NEL Pbk £5.99
There are now seven of Betty Rowlands' Melissa Craig mysteries. The publication of DeadlyLegacy in the New English Library Paperback series coincides within the month with the issue of Smiling at Death by Hodder and Stoughton in hardback.
Deadly Legacy The once quiet Cotswold town, Stowbridge, has been plagued by a sex strangler, aseries of burglaries and finally the death of Gloucestershire's most prolific novelist, Leonora Jewell. Rowlands' heroine-sleuth, crime writer, Melissa Craig is persuaded to complete Jewell's unfinished novel, and is alarmed to discover the author's death may not have been an accident. Clues in the script suggest a motive for murder and Ms. Craig embarks on her own investigation.
REVIEW
Smiling at Death
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99
Smiling at Death Ms. Craig's reputation for solving genuine mysteries has gone before her. So, when she reads, in the local paper of the murders of a series of three elderly people, in the nearby village of Thanebury, she decides to keep a low profile. Then, an elderly guest fails to turn up at a party and Ms. Craig is asked to find out what is wrong. Her lover, a retired police officer turned private investigator, unchivalrously waits outside while she discovers the body. He tells her he believes this is the fourth of the serial killer's victims. Ms. Craig begins an enquiry of her own.
The Financial Times describes Ms. Craig as Rowlands' "canny and vigorous heroine."
Vigorous she certainly is. Her amour is a senior detective of fifty. Ms. Rowlands is coyly vague about the actual age of her amateur detective but her son is grown up and has established his own career in the United States.
Nevertheless, she talks and behaves like a twenty year old, scrambling over walls and up ladders on to roofs, troubled by vertigo but not by resisting muscles or protesting bones.
She is one of the mighty throng of fictional "ordinary citizens" who, with unlikely frequency, come across violent death and deal with the repercussions of it with more efficiency than the police. Politically correct for the most part, she buys freshly roasted coffee beans and has disposed of just one husband so that she is not yet jaundiced, but experienced and available.
Her artist friend, Iris, has eccentricities that endear her and skills and professional knowledge which add to the interest and help not a little in the unravelling of the mysteries. She is strictly vegetarian and "internationally acclaimed".
Ms. Craig is merely successful and comfortably off, but sufficiently a woman
of the world to be unfazed by her friend's reputation.
The stories, though, are gripping, the plots move swiftly, the strands are neatly woven and the perpetrator in each case is a surprise.
Pauline Bell author of six novels featuring DC Benny Mitchell and his colleagues