Cyanide with Christie
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A game of charades ends in coldblooded murder in this entertaining cozy mystery, third in the Crime with the Classics series.
Having finished transforming Windy Corner, the grand Victorian mansion she inherited from her great aunt, into a writers’ retreat, widowed literature professor Emily Cavanaugh is ready to receive her first set of guests. But her careful planning is thrown into disarray by the unexpected arrival of outrageous true-crime writer, Cruella Crime, whose unpardonably rude behaviour is causing great offence. As a ferocious ice storm rages outside, the guests entertain one another with a game of charades.
But their revelries are brought to a sudden halt by the discovery of a body in one of the guest bedrooms. When it transpires the victim was poisoned, Emily decides to take a leaf out of the book of her favourite detective writer, Agatha Christie, and investigate. But as she pursues her enquiries, it becomes chillingly clear that she herself may have been the intended victim...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hyde's so-so third Crime with the Classics mystery (after 2017's Bloodstains with Bront ), Emily Cavanaugh has taken a sabbatical from her position as a literature professor after inheriting Windy Corner in Stony Beach, Ore., and has set about transforming the house into a writers' retreat. Her first guests, who include Ian MacDonald, a noted novelist, and Oscar Lansing, a struggling academic, are housebound during a storm. Lt. Luke Richards, the local lawman, who has been persistent in his efforts to persuade Emily to marry him, is also present, and becomes increasingly jealous of her rapport with Oscar. After some heavy-handed foreshadowing, someone is poisoned, though it's unclear whether the murderer killed the intended victim. The breezy attitude toward death (a friend of Emily calls this murder "fun," in contrast to a previous one at Windy Corners, which she considered "rather a nuisance") undercuts the emotional resonance of the final Dickensian twist. Readers with a high tolerance for Jessica Fletcher syndrome are most likely to enjoy this one.
