A SHARE IN DEATH
by Deborah Crombie
The morning after Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid arrives at Followdale House in northern England, he finds assistant manager Sebastian Wade's electrocuted corpse in the time-share's pool. Suicide, insists dim, boorish local Chief Inspector Nash, but Duncan interrupts his holiday to investigate his fellow guests: political hopeful Patrick Rennie and his well-connected wife Marta; endearing spinster sisters Penelope and Emma MacKenzie; ex-army twit Edward Lyle and his long-suffering wife Janet; and attractive scientist Hannah Alcock, who has her own hidden agenda at Followdale. There'll be more murderous attacks, some neat mystification, and a modestly effective solution, though Anglophilic first-novelist Crombie, a Texan, piles on the Yorkshire charm a little thick. Quietly competent, in the manner of the early Martha Grimes.