Robert Forsyth

Robert Forsythe, London's favorite gentleman sleuth, is called to determine which of 87 suspects is taking potshots at a rich old coot, and Fosythe's intrepid assistant finds herself in the middle of a locked-room murder mystery! You thought the quest for eternal life was a new preoccupation, the preserve of tech bros with too much money? Not so. It's the 1980s, and rich old dilettante Winslow Maxwell Penndragon is shooting for a century or more...but somebody else is shooting, and they're aiming at Penndragon. With heirs aplenty, Winslow P. calls in Robert Forsythe, a London barrister with a nose for trouble and a reputation for discretion, to figure out who's got murder on the mind. Forsythe loves a good puzzle, but he does not love Winslow P.-and it would appear he's got company. As assistant to Forsythe and witness to his exploits, "Sandy" Sanderson surely knows that when you bring a group of celebrity strangers to a snowbound, isolated hotel, it rarely ends well. But Christmas in the countryside sounded so appealing! So when one of the guests fails to turn up for breakfast, it's terrible, of course, but for Sandy it's also ever-so-slightly familiar. She knows her Agatha Christie. And this is not her first rodeo.

Gentlemanly Robert Forsythe and his longtime PA "Sandy" Sanderson are sleuthing up a storm, investigating innocent victims who maybe weren't so innocent after all… No, Katherine St. Croix was not a hoofer, but she also wasn't the pathetic, angelic starveling that the wealthy Dancer clan imagined. In fact, she was a talented con artist, selling her sob story while helping herself to the family jewels and silver. But what she is now is dead, her mutilated body found on the Dancer estate. It's clear that one of the Dancers is similarly sitting on some sinister secrets, and Forsythe has been asked to poke around. He's happy to do the favor, especially if he can stay alive while doing it. And who would kill the village sawbones, nice Dr. Foster, not to mention his pretty wife? To answer that question, Sandy goes undercover, only to discover an embarrassment of suspects: it seems that half the folks in town had reason to loathe the doctor, not to mention his pretty wife. Can Sandy sift through them all? Sure...but she'll risk her own life to do it.

With A Death for Adonis and A Death for a Darling we are delighted to introduce the Robert Forsythe series, which was written primarily in the 1980s but carries all the flavors (er, flavours) that fans of British Golden Age mystery have come to expect. Forsythe himself-a brilliant young barrister forced to give up the law in response to a dreadful and undisclosed disgrace-is very much in the Wimsey mold, which is to say that solving crimes is his personal passion but by no means his bread and butter. And though Forsythe lacks a Lugg-like manservant, he does have an indispensable and devoted secretary who shares the spotlight as the series develops. Both Adonis and Darling nod very distinctly in the direction of the classic murder mystery novel: Darling, in fact, is set during a country-house weekend! And for all that Giroux (pseudonym of Canadian writer Doris Shannon) was clearly steeped in the genre, the Forsythe series is no museum piece, managing the neat trick of being both charmingly vivid and delightfully well bred.