Fatality with Forster

by Katherine Bolger Hyde

Overview

Emily Cavanaugh walks into a family drama that recalls Forster's classic work while honeymooning at an English country house in the gripping fifth Crime with the Classics cozy.

Retired professor Emily Cavanaugh and her husband, Luke, are taking a much-needed break from Windy Corner and spending their honeymoon five thousand miles away as paying guests at Fizhugh Manor in Oxfordshire.

Quaint nearby villages and the manor's impressive turrets and arches capture Emily's Anglophile heart, but when she meets its dashing young heir, James Fitzhugh and his American wife, Allison, James's cousin Penelope, his dithering uncle Roger and the manor's formidable dowager, Lady Margaret Fitzhugh, it's clear that class prejudice, resentment and secrets threaten to tear the family apart. Is there more to a fatal accident than meets the eye?

Emily soon finds herself in the middle of a family drama redolent of Forster's classic novels, but can she pull off her own masterstroke to catch a killer?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448305308
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Series:	Crime with the Classics Series , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	387,266
File size:	541 KB

About the Author

Katherine Bolger Hyde has lived her life surrounded by books, from teaching herself to read at the age of four to majoring in Russian literature to making her career as an editor. She lives in California with her husband and is the author of four previous Crime with the Classics mysteries.

Editorial Reviews

05/24/2021

Hyde’s evocative fifth Crime with Classics mystery (after 2019’s Death with Dostoevsky) takes former literature professor Emily Cavanaugh and her new husband, Sheriff Luke Richardson, of Stony Beach, Ore., to a B&B on a grand English estate for a monthlong honeymoon. Their hosts, Sir James Fitzhugh and his American wife, Allison, have instituted several moneymaking schemes to contribute to the estate’s upkeep, of which the B&B is one. The hosts are keeping James’s extremely traditional grandmother, Lady Margaret, who was horrified that her darling grandson married an American, in the dark about such changes, as they know she would never approve. James and Allison are striving to live authentic lives, and Lady Margaret is desperate to maintain the family’s position and keep up appearances. When a shocking murder occurs on the estate, Lady Margaret insists Allison is to blame, and Emily and Luke are thrust into the whodunit equivalent of an E.M. Forster novel. Literary references galore and plenty of chilling English manor house atmosphere more than make up for what amounts to not much of a mystery. Hyde knows how to hook the reader. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron Assoc. (July)

Publishers Weekly

This engaging British cozy “with a twist” features likable characters, appealing descriptions of England, a meaty mystery, and a satisfying conclusion - Booklist

Literary references galore and plenty of chilling English manor house atmosphere … Hyde knows how to hook the reader - Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Another winning cozy, with love finally prevailing

Booklist on Cyanide with Christie

Effectively blends romance and mystery, delivering a suitably satisfactory ending to a winning campus cozy

Booklist on Death with Dostoevsky

2021-04-14
“I’m counting on this being a corpse-free honeymoon,” Lt. Sheriff Luke Richards tells his bride, the former Emily Cavanaugh. As if.

The happy couple have distanced themselves from Oregon, the scene of their earlier mildly criminal adventures. They’ve booked a month’s stay in England at Fitzhugh Manor, near Binsey, a village within shouting distance of Oxford. In fact, they’re the very first paying guests to enjoy the hospitality of Sir James Fitzhugh and his American wife, Allison. Of course there are ripples in the pond. James’ grandmother, Lady Margaret Fitzhugh, is in such denial about her grandson’s decision to turn the manor into a guesthouse that Allison asks Emily and Luke to introduce themselves to the dragon as her friends. When Allison, who’s excited about the fact that she and James have hired her ex-fiance, architect Adam Marshall, to design a housing development they plan to build on the estate, shares the news of her pregnancy with Emily, her happiness reminds her confidante painfully of the long-ago miscarriage that ended her own dreams of bearing children. And Penelope "Bunty" Fitzhugh, the distant cousin James never married, is clearly having it on with Conan O’Donnell, her partner in the Fitzhugh Stables, even though Lady Margaret regards him as a member of a distinctly lesser species. When a horseback riding accident begins to look like murder, Emily and Luke figure that they’d better solve it posthaste in order to reestablish peace in the family.

Blink and you’ll miss the reference to E.M. Forster, which is just as well, since it gives far too much away.

Kirkus Reviews