About the Author:
Terence Faherty's Scott Elliott series has been honored twice with the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus Award. His amateur sleuth series, featuring failed seminarian Owen Keane, has received two nominations for the Edgar Allen Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Faherty lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with his wife Jan.
Before Robin Agnew sold mystery books, she was a mystery fan and a watercolor artist who sold her paintings at various summer art fairs. Her lifelong loves of art and mysteries are often combined when she has the opportunity to illustrate books for The Mystery Company; and she's able to read lots at Aunt Agatha's, her mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Review:
"Hollywood Security operative Scott Elliott, two days away from his wedding, accepts what seems like a simple assignment – discourage a romance between an actor and a burlesque star that may be detrimental to the filming of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In post-war Hollywood, The Tempest seems likely to be the last great swan song of a group of British Colonists, if their leading man can be separated from his 'farmer’s daughter.' As the cast of characters grows, so does the complexity of the case, echoing the Bard’s final work. Pitch perfect dialogue and descriptions of the era, nicely accented by pen and ink line drawings, make this a neat little treasure for fans of historical mysteries and Shakespeare alike."
Maryelizabeth Hart, Mysterious Galaxy' The Plot Thickens
"The breezy, humorous crime novel is a sub-genre that flourished in the 1930s and ’40s, either influenced by or influencing the motion picture screwball comedies of the day. Authors like Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer and Harry Kurnitz, who also scribbled for the screen, fashioned entertaining whodunits where the talk was fast and smart, the males were unflappable, the females sexy and witty and the booze flowed like water. For a quick reminder of the lovely silliness and sheer entertainment of those freer and easier days, one need look no further than Terence Faherty's short novel In A Teapot.
"This new well-plotted mystery set in 1948 Hollywood finds the author's series hero Scott Elliott only a short time past a career shift from underemployed actor to in-demand private detective. On the eve of Elliott's marriage to script reader Ella Englehart, his boss at Hollywood Security tosses him a new assignment involving a young British actor, Forest Combs, who has just been cast in a film to be based on Shakespeare's final play, “The Tempest.”
"Faherty tosses in all the proper ingredients an extremely likeable sleuthing couple, a bloody corpse and a gallery of suspects, a little light-hearted, considerably less than R-rated sex, mobsters, funny patter and even a bit of unobtrusive historical info.
"It's all frothy good fun, and as Scott and Ella do their Nick and Nora thing, working their way though a labyrinth of lies and deceptions and hidden motives to find a killer before taking their vows, it's soon made clear that the author has been playing a literary game all the while, one that readers, even those unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play, will have to admit is monstrously clever."
Dick Lochte, OC Metro, 12/8/05
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