Thinner Than Water

Against her better judgment, Virginia Freer has agreed to be a witness at an old friend’s second wedding―against her judgment because the other witness is Felix, her sort-of-ex-husband. On the other hand, she does rather enjoy Felix…in small doses.

Thank heavens for that, because little else about the wedding is enjoyable, from the oddly unwelcoming hostess to the vicious murder of the groom’s father, shortly after the spectacularly dull reception. At least the police are amusing―right out of a third-rate comedy, with their insistence that this was just a robbery gone wrong. True, some silver appears to be missing, but Felix and Virginia have (sadly) seen enough murders to know when a fellow has been deliberately whacked in the head. Nailing down the details and persuading the police will take some time. It seems Virginia is in for rather a larger dose of Felix than she 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.