Optioned by Columbia for a major motion picture, this new who-dunit continues the popular series. It features one of the most perfectly mismatched pairs of sleuths in British mystery fiction: the aristocratic Lord Edward Corinth and left-wing journalist Verity Browne. In a lively new adventure, Verity finds herself, despite her communist sympathies, traveling in a first-class cabin of the elegant, luxuriously appointed RMS Queen Mary. And not Edward Corinth but the handsome and charismatic Sam Forrest, an American labor-union organizer, occupies the quarters next door. However, Corinth is on board—at the behest of the eminent British economist Lord Benyon, who has scheduled a top-secret meeting regarding his country’s rearmament with President Roosevelt in the United States. Only the secret is out, and someone wants Lord Benyon out of the way. But it’s U.S. Senator George Earle Day who turns up dead. An inflammatory right-wing racist, Day has managed to make many enemies among the ship’s passengers, most notably the politically controversial black American singer and actor Warren Fairley, his Hollywood starlet wife, a leading German-Jewish aeronautical engineer, a charming American socialite of dubious pedigree, and an effete English art dealer whose curiosity is outstripped by his deceit.
In Roberts's fourth solid entry in his stylish cozy series set in the 1930s (after 2003's Hollow Crown), Lord Edward Corinth, wealthy man-about-town, and journalist Verity Browne, a card-carrying communist, travel first-class aboard the Queen Mary. Their first evening at sea, a guided tour reveals a carcass that will not appear on anyone's plate except that of the medical examiner when the ship puts into New York harbor: someone has murdered the valet of a senior British government official and hidden his body in a refrigeration compartment. Edward and Verity join forces to unmask the killer in a variation on the classic locked-room mystery. After a sluggish start, the liner and story pick up momentum, and Roberts amuses with his well-researched descriptions of the flagship of the Cunard Line and large cast of secondary characters. His lighthearted depiction of a hero and heroine with opposite political agendas and an unacknowledged, but mutual, attraction allows the two to explore both politics and the attraction without slowing the vague and rather haphazard plot. This is one to take on a cruise, or to read in front of a fire while others are on the slopes.
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