Murder by Numbers
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
And then there was one . . . can Donald Langham and Maria Dupré stop a killer who's picking off victims one by one?
December, 1956. Donald Langham's wife Maria Dupré receives a chilling invitation to attend a death at the home of Maxwell Falwell Fenton in Essex. The once-prominent artist has a number of enemies, and has faded into obscurity since the war ended. Is the invitation to his own death or someone else’s?
Arriving at Winterfield on a cold winter evening, Donald and Maria meet five strangers who have also received numbered invitations. They all had a reason to hate or fear Maxwell – including Maria, who reveals a secret from her own past. But is she telling the whole truth?
The soiree produces a gruesome and dramatic twist, but it’s about to get much worse when someone starts picking off the six, one by one. Can Donald untangle lies, betrayal, and incredible revelations to identify the killer before Maria becomes the next victim?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's solid seventh mystery featuring private detective and thriller writer Donald Langham and his wife, literary agent Marie Dupr (after 2019's Murder Served Cold), opens on December 3, 1956, when Maria receives an invitation, marked with the number 6, to "attend a death" that evening. The sender is artist Maxwell Fenton, whom Maria struck and scarred with a fireplace poker after he made aggressive sexual advances decades before. At the artist's Essex home, a gaunt and barely recognizable Fenton details his grievances against each of the six guests and then shoots himself. Witnessing his suicide seems to be Fenton's revenge, until three of the guests he assembled are murdered in the order indicated by the numbers on their invitations to Fenton's death. Maria is clearly in danger, but who's committing crimes motivated by a dead man's grudges? Langham investigates an actor friend of Fenton's who disappeared around the time of the shooting. Though copious backstory slows the early chapters, clever plot twists soon spin the dramatic premise into a gripping tale. Agatha Christie fans will have fun.
