The Pied Piper of Death
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Charming husband-and-wife sleuthing team Lyon and Bea Wentworth visit the estate of a power-mad manufacturer in this classic manor-house mystery.
Children’s book author and occasional sleuth Lyon Wentworth arrives at the Piper estate prepared to come face to face with death. The leading manufacturer of landmines, the Piper Corporation is no stranger to casualties, but the estate is being besieged by protestors and the pressure is getting to them. Head of the family Peyton Piper has always exerted firm control over his kin, but as he prepares for a Senate bid, he’s pulling the leash even tighter. Family historian Markham Swan fears one of the Pipers’ lives is in danger—but Markham himself will catch the first two bullets.
The slugs that kill him are tiny little things, antique bullets that date back to the Civil War. Lyon will deploy every ounce of his considerable charm in trying to unravel the mystery, but that may not be enough. When the Piper family turns on itself, the results will be explosive.
Written in the style of a classic English murder mystery, The Pied Piper of Death will charm fans of Agatha Christie and Dorothy B. Sayers. Staged with Richard Forrest’s trademark wit, it’s an undeniable classic.
The Pied Piper of Death is the 8th book in the Lyon and Bea Wentworth Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An unscrupulous munitions manufacturer with senatorial aspirations and a vendetta going back to the Civil War figure in Forrest's eighth mystery in 20 years featuring children's-book writer Lyon Wentworth, his wife Bea, a Connecticut state senator, and their friend, local police chief Rocco Herbert. Lyon's characters are called the Wobbly Monsters. Forrest's plotting and stock characters are also wobbly, the comfortable relationship between Bea and Lyon notwithstanding. A lively political party at the estate of Peyton Piper turns somber when Lyon finds the murdered body of Markham Swan, who was writing a history of the Piper Munitions Company while having an affair with Piper's wife and eyeing Piper's 18-year-old daughter. Lyon discovers that for 130 years the eldest Piper child has died at 18, shot with a Civil War-era pistol, a fact that the Piper family dismisses as coincidence. Lyon and "Rabbit" Welch, one of a family of dwarves who work for the Pipers, find clues to the murders in a secret Underground Railroad room beneath the family mausoleum. An historian at the Antietam battlefield conveniently reveals the rest to Lyon--the motive for revenge begun at that battle in 1864 and preposterously carried on into the present.
