Corpse de Ballet: A Nine Muses Mystery: Terpsichore - Hardcover

Pall, Ellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312280335 ISBN 13: 9780312280338

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2001

Synopsis

It's not as if Juliet Bodine wishes that she'd stayed an English professor instead of becoming a successful romance novelist. It's just that writing, though interesting, is never easy, and she will do almost anything to avoid her desk. So she succumbs to the pleas of her friend Ruth, a renowned choreographer, to help translate Dickens' Great Expectations into ballet form.

Watching the magnificent dancers work is fascinating. But Juliet soon finds the company plagued by jealousies, subterranean liaisons, ugly sabotage, and-sudden death.

Could it be murder?

NYPD detective Murray Landis is skeptical. But Juliet-who is startled to recognize in Murray the budding sculptor who dated her college roommate years ago-disagrees, and turns her novelist's sense of plot and character to detection. Can she and Murray unmask the ruthless choreographer of a pas de death?

Fast, witty, and literate, Corpse de Ballet marks the dazzling debut of the Nine Muses Mysteries featuring Juliet Bodine and Murray Landis.

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Pall, a novelist whose prose has been praised as "precise, shrewd and brightly amusing" (Kirkus Reviews), with sentences that are "good enough to eat" (The New Yorker), is the author of Back East and Among the Ginzburgs; she has also written nine Regency romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. As a freelance journalist, she has written extensively on people in the arts for The New York Times and other publications. Corpse de Ballet is her first mystery. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Richard Dicker, and their son, Ben.

From Publishers Weekly

Terpsichore, the ancient Greek goddess of dance, must be smiling down from her home on Mt. Helicon at Pall's (Back East) splendid first entry in this cleverly themed series with its insights into the egos, jealousies, pains and passions of a Manhattan ballet company. Juliet Bodine, a successful writer of Regency novels and ex-professor of English literature at Barnard, puts aside her own deadlines to give literary advice to her longtime friend, Ruth Renswick, choreographer for the Jansch Ballet Company of New York, who is creating a new ballet based on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. A ballet fan herself, Juliet is fascinated by the personalities of the company and the process of creating a new production. When a lead dancer dies suddenly, she's convinced it was murder, but her old Harvard friend, police detective Murray Landis, concludes the death was a suicide. Case closed, but not for Juliet. From the executive director to the lowliest member of the corps, the characters come alive through Juliet's astute observations and the extremely well-crafted dialogue. Vivid settings capture summer in New York, and one can almost feel the heat and steam of the ballet studio. Both mystery fans and ardent balletomanes will be left with great expectations and eager anticipation for the next in the series.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312280335
• ISBN 13: 9780312280338
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288