A Murder Too Many

Ah, it’s an academic conference, with all the egos, the scandals, the terrifyingly petty squabbles on display. Well….perhaps not so petty.

Professor Andrew Basnett has returned to his old university for a meeting of the Botanical Association, an event that should be entirely benign, except that he can’t help being just a little curious about Carl Judd, an artist who was murdered here just two years ago. And, of course, about Stephen Sharland, who’s in prison for the murder, only no one thinks he did it, not even Judd’s widow.

The rumors are flying, the tongues are wagging, and then the only witness to the crime? He gets murdered, too! It’s all too exciting—no, sorry, too terrible, too terrible for words. Thank heavens Andrew Basnett is on hand to weed out the gossip and dig for the taproot of truth.

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.