Kissing The Gunner's Daughter
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
The fifteenth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford.
The thirteenth of May is famously the unluckiest day of the year. Sergeant Caleb Martin of Kingsmarkham CID had no idea just how terminally unlucky it would prove, as he embarked upon his last day on earth...
Ten months later, Wexford is confronted with a murder scene of horrific brutality. At first the bloodbath at Tancred House looks like the desperate work of a burglar panicked into murder. The sole survivor of the massacre, seventeen-year-old Daisy Flory, remembers the events imperfectly, and her confused account of the fatal night seems to confirm this theory. But more and more, Chief Inspector Wexford is convinced that the crime lies closer to home, and that it has sinister links to the murder of Sergeant Martin...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four years after The Veiled One , Rendell's Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford returns in a superbly characterized, deftly plotted puzzler that explores the dark side of family life. A dinner-hour call for help brings Wexford and his assistants to Tancred House, where, in a chilling scene of carnage, he finds popular anthropologist and novelist Davina Flory, her husband, daughter and teenage granddaughter bleeding profusely from bullet wounds. Only young Daisy, who made the call, is alive. As she recovers, celebrates her 18th birthday and, in a willful, winning way, resumes living at Tancred House, Wexford tries to trace the two killers, who stole Davina's jewels as well. His investigation focuses first on the servants--a bitter couple whom Daisy soon dismisses, a handsome caretaker and a slow-witted neighborhood woman who later discovers the body of a local man, a petty blackmailer, hanging from a tree. While methodically seeking clues on the vast grounds of Tancred House and in nearby Kingsmarkham, Wexford is drawn to the plucky survivor, even as he grieves over his estrangement from his daughter Sheila, who is in love with an insufferable young novelist. For all the suspenseful pleasures of the plot, which includes arson and another murder, it's Rendell's characters, major and minor, who are standouts. This is among the very best from the accomplished, prolific author of The Veiled One and The Bridesmaid. 35,000 first printing; author tour.
