MURDER AND THE GOLDEN GOBLET

A death in 1961 may hold the clue to the whereabouts of King Arthur’s golden goblet.

Wheelchair-bound ex-cop Peter Marsh and his daughter Georgia discover interesting old cases, solve them and publish the results. A trip to a family wedding puts them onto Lance Venyon, an art expert and ladies’ man whose disappearance from his yacht was put down as an accident even though many of his friends and relatives think he was murdered. Georgia travels to Paris to meet with one of Lance’s old flames, now married to Antonio Benizi, whose family deals, perhaps extra-legally, in high-end art and artifacts. There she runs into her con-man ex-husband, whose search for stolen art, supposedly for only the best people, has brought him up against a painting attributed to Rossetti showing Arthur holding the goblet. Lance’s old friend Jago Priest, an Arthurian fanatic who married another of Lance’s loves, thinks he knows where the bones of Sir Gawain and the goblet are buried. The plot thickens when a young member of a family of talented copyists and forgers is shot in the local graveyard. Peter (on his computer) and Georgia (on foot) follow endless trails leading to dead ends before they finally close the case.

Less exciting than Myers’s last (Murder in Hell’s Corner, 2007, etc.), but there’s a sting in the tail that makes wading through all those red herrings worthwhile.