Tony is found dead in at the Meriwether boarding house. It looks for all the world like a suicide, except there’s no gun and the phone’s been cut. Vicky, niece of the fabulously wealthy Cadwallader “Candy” Van Garter, is one of the residents. She theoretically runs an antique shop and tea room in town, but the business is really a hobby. She had just that day been stood up for a date with Tony and raged most violently. Personally, Candy fears she killed him and tries to invent some way to take the blame himself. Vicky, meanwhile, is convinced Candy did it.
Of the several other occupants are Helene Bailey, the landlady, and Dot, her ostensibly seventeen year old daughter; Sarah Parnham, a teacher, and her much younger and mildly retarded stepmother, Evadne; Oswald, storekeeper whose real passion is astrology; Paul Keasy, radio host; and the late Tony Charvan, who had a fifteen minute slot on the radio but no other obvious source of income.
Can crime analyst Lynn MacDonald discover the murder?
I rather like most of the Strahan mysteries I’ve read, but this is a lesser entry. You can certainly get ahead of it in places — the chronology of Tony’s night falls apart when you realize his segments are pre-recorded, and that’s hinted at pretty much off the bat — and the going to the movies alibi is a great deal too pat to not be planned — but I don’t think it’s solvable. Frankly, even in-story, it’s a wild guess on MacDonald’s part based on precious little evidence.
Inscriptions: between pages 198 and 199 is clipping from The Evening Bulletin, of Providence, dated May 12, 1954. It’s a recipe for marshmallow fudge.