REQUIEM FOR A MEZZO

Another adventure for the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple, struggling in the years after WW I to build a writing career and to nourish a budding romance with Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Alec Fletcher (The Winter Garden Mystery, p. 426)—both in conflict with the aristocratic strictures of the day. Daisy's next-door neighbor is Muriel Westlea, who lives with her sister Bettina, an aspiring opera singer, and brother-in-law Roger Abernathy, a music teacher much older than the mean-spirited, faithless wife on whom he dotes. Daisy and Alec are guests at an Albert Hall performance in which Bettina is singing a solo role, and after intermission, see her collapse and die after drinking from a poisoned decanter. Present in the lounge where the decanter sat during intermission were Bettina's recent lover, tenor Gilbert Gower, and his wife Jennifer; Muriel Westlea; Russian Jewish violinist Yakov Levich, who's in love with Muriel; aggressive bass Dimitri Marchenko, and Roger Abernathy, among others. Alec and his trusty Sergeant Tom Tring, with some discreet help from Daisy, try to sort out motives and methods, but it's an attempted copycat murder that eventually leads to a solution of the crime. The plotting is fussy—at times absurd—but the author handles with finesse the taken-for-granted anti-Semitism of the English upper class of the era: an unexpected plus in an otherwise easy-to- take but fluffy confection.