The Rotary Club Murder Mystery

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUG 2, 1993

Drab prose, coyly rendered oldsters and one outright example of not playing fair with the reader mar this sequel to The Famous DAR Murder Mystery . Once again, feisty 88-year-old Harriet Bushrow must find a killer when the police in ``Borderville, Virginia-Tennessee,'' come up short after a Rotary Club district governor is found dead in a locked hotel room with a handgun, a skimpy suicide note and a Dick Francis novel, not fully read. (No one, Harriet declares, would do themselves in before finishing a Francis yarn.) The dead man leaves behind a failing business, an unprovided-for first wife and their three lazy kids, an unhappy second wife and several women friends in various states of despondency. Harriet ingeniously solves the locked-door problem, but the identity of the killer, once revealed, makes the whole caper seem rather simpleminded. A fragmented narrative, its chapters related by various characters who sound exactly the same, and Harriet's insistent reluctance to face the modern world's perils derail this tale. Fans of the first book may not be disappointed, but others might wish they had the corpse's copy of Break In instead.