A Wreath for Rivera
Red-hot jazz meets cold-blooded murder.When Lord Pastern Bagott takes up with the hot music of Breezy Bellair and his Boys, his disapproving wife Cecile has more than usual to be unhappy about. The band's devastatingly handsome but roguish accordionist, Carlos Rivera, has taken a rather intense...
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Red-hot jazz meets cold-blooded murder.When Lord Pastern Bagott takes up with the hot music of Breezy Bellair and his Boys, his disapproving wife Cecile has more than usual to be unhappy about. The band's devastatingly handsome but roguish accordionist, Carlos Rivera, has taken a rather intense and mutual interest in her precious daughter Felicite. So when a bit of strange business goes awry and actually kills him, it's lucky that Inspector Roderick Alleyn is in the audience. Now Alleyn must follow a confusing score that features a chorus of family and friends desperate to hide the truth and perhaps shelter a murderer in their midst.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780312966065 (0312966067)
Publish date: June 15th 1998
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Pages no: 336
Edition language: English
Series: Roderick Alleyn 1 (#15)
All build-up, then -- fizzle.There's this crazy cast of (to me rather annoying and unlikable) characters: the family of rich eccentrics, lounge musicians, drug dealers, magazine columnists... and then once we get the relationships and plot all worked out, it's over. Disappointing. I felt bad for the...
I absolutely love British mysteries. True, they are not realistic: more an exercise in cerebration than realistic criminal investigation. It is a sort of magic trick-literary sleight of hand. We try to guess - without success - "whodunit"; and we are delighted when in the last chapter, the detect...
My reading of this book is coloured by my extreme hatred of Lord Pastern, of the type of person who is at core a spoiled child masquerading as an adult: selfish, uncaring, manipulative. Pastern's failings then taint a second character, Ned Manx, who is aware of a particular secret of Pastern's, and...
[These notes were made in 1985:]. A sleazy accordion-player in a fashionable swing band is shot at (as part of the act) by the guest drummer, an eccentric peer, whose daughter the accordion-player - Carlos - is courting. The accordion-player dies of a steel dart (part of an umbrella) through the he...
Very good but, as usual, for me it took too long for Alleyn to appear and I thought the ending too abrupt. But the mystery was EXcellent.
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