Touch and Go
-
- $0.99
-
- $0.99
Publisher Description
Chance is a fine thing, thought the nurse who had watched wealthy Muriel Probert die in her Fifth Avenue apartment, so she took that chance – along with other fine things – and ran.
To Lennox Kemp, Muriel’s ex-husband, the string of gambling casinos in Las Vegas left to him in her will seemed a dubious inheritance, bound to bring out the worst in everyone concerned whether they be prevaricating lawyers or predatory gangsters.
But the slow legal process is undercut when a body is found in the East River, and there will soon be another victim as the hunt for the missing nurse turns murderous. Kemp would prefer the nastiness kept on the far side of the Atlantic, but when the final showdown comes it is on his own home ground of Newtown, where the local police force gets a taste of gunplay, Nevada-style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A copy of the latest will written by widowed Muriel Probert shortly before her lonely death in a posh Manhattan apartment indicates that she left a suitcase filled with rubies and shares in a Las Vegas casino to her first husband, British lawyer Lennox Kemp (featured in A Worm of Doubt and six other mysteries). But the jewels and the legal copy of the will are missing, as is the self-effacing nurse Smith, who cared for Muriel during her last weeks. Kemp--intelligent, skeptical but above all a dedicated Don Quixote--begins a transatlantic investigation of those near Muriel at the end: her longtime housekeeper Florence (recently wed to the strange new butler), a slow-witted maid, nurse Smith, the doctor, the lawyers, and most of all Muriel's late husband's menacing partners in the casino. The absorbing tale is somewhat flawed by an occasionally careless blend of British expressions with stereotypical American slang. But the scenes with the dying Muriel are affecting, the resolution is intriguing and the central characters--Lennox and nurse Smith--are appealing enough to engage the reader right to the end.
