The Other Devil's Name

Andrew Basnett may be retired from academia, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped his former colleagues from dumping problems in his lap. This time around it’s the peppery Constance Camm, whose neighbors keep disappearing. Miss Camm and her sister, Mollie, might be tempted to shrug things off, were it not for a frightening letter. “I know where you buried the body,” says the letter, but…to which disappeared neighbor does the letter refer? And why was it sent to Mollie, who hasn’t been burying anything? Spurred by a desire to help a friend (and—admit it!—by his own curiosity), Professor Basnett starts poking around. But his efforts uncover more than one village skeleton, and they may call up more than anyone has bargained for.

Morna Doris MacTaggart was born in Burma in 1907 and sent at the age of six to a prestigious boarding school in England. After an early marriage and the publication of two novels, in 1940 her life was turned upside-down when she both met Robert Brown and published Give a Corpse a Bad Name (as E.X. Ferrars), her first mystery and the first in what would become the five-book “Toby Dyke” series. She and Brown married in 1945 and in 1951 moved to the US, though they returned to the UK only a year later, sickened by America’s turn toward McCarthyism. In 1953 Ferrars helped found the Crime Writers’ Association. The couple lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, during which Ferrars wrote more than 35 crime novels, finally returning to series mystery―first with the “Virginia and Alex Freer” books and then with “Andrew Basnett”―in the late 1970s, after a move to Oxfordshire. She died in 1995, having published more than 75 novels and numerous short stories, nearly all of them involving dead bodies.