A Dark Coffin - Softcover

Butler, Gwendoline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312291795 ISBN 13: 9780312291792

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996

Synopsis

Marriage is proving anything but dull for Commander John Coffin, keeper of the peace in London's Second City. With grande dame of the stage Stella Pinero in his life, Coffin's days lack no drama." "When the curtain comes down on opening night in Stella's newly transformed theater, Joe and Josie Macintosh are found stabbed to death in their theater box. A curious note left next to their bodies reveals that Joe and Josie Macintosh have carried out a suicide pact.

But the couple's double suicide follows closely on the heels of an unexpected visitor from Coffin's past: Inspector Harry Trent. Coffin worked with Trent years ago, and now Trent is searching for his identical twin brother -- a dangerous man; a man who might already have killed a woman; a man Trent fears might have threatened violence to the Macintoshes, the couple who fostered the twins as children.

Coffin quickly realizes that the illusions of the theater mean that nothing is as it seems; such is the case in the Macintoshes' apparent suicide. As Coffin investigates the couple's death, he learns he must find not only their killer but also their true identities.

And then there is the persistent, looming question: Who is Harry Trent and what is he capable of doing? The answer lies in the past - bizarre, terrifying, and horribly real. . .

Coffin will find Stella's knowledge of the theater indispensable if he is to solve this mystery of Jekylls and Hydes on both sides of the footlights

About this title

About the Author:

Gwendoline Butler writes under her own name and the pseudonym Jennie Melville.  Educated at Haberdashers, she read history at Oxford, and later married Dr. Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She has one daughter. She is a winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger Award. She was also selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The London Times. She lives in Surrey, England.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A pair of bizarre murders is complicating life for Chief Commander John Coffin in his Second City of London bailiwick (The Coffin Tree, 1996, etc.). The victims are Joe and Josie Macintosh, vendors of food from their street stands around the neighborhood, often in front of the St. Luke's theater complex, which is presided over by Coffin's actress wife Stella Pinero. Someone had sent the Macintoshes tickets for the opening night of a new show at St. Luke's. Now the two are found, carefully stabbed to death, in one of the theater's boxes, with what appears to be a suicide note on the floor. Coffin is also involved with the troubles of Harry Trent, an old friend on leave from another precinct who's looking for his strange and worrisome twin brother Mark. The twins had spent some growing-up, painful years as wards of the Macintoshes, but this murdered pair are not the same Macintoshes the brothers knew--in more ways than one. A thorough search of the couple's shabby house and garden soon provides the reason. At the theater, meanwhile, Stella, her general manager Alfreda Boxer, Alfreda's son Barnabas, who serves as assistant stage manager, and wardrobe mistress May Renier are going about the theater's business as routinely as possible--until the day Stella is attacked and stabbed in one of the storage rooms. The plotting is dense and murky, the writing sometimes oblique and pretentious, especially during a series of dark, anonymous musings on the Jekyll-Hyde theme. But there's a neat surprise in the tortuous puzzle's resolution, and more than enough menacing suspense to grip the reader to the end. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0312291795
• ISBN 13: 9780312291792
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208