Last Nocturne
A Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Beautifully written and highly evocative of the bustling streets of London and Vienna in the early twentieth century, Marjorie Eccles's Last Nocturne is an intriguingly complex mystery of passion and the devastating repercussions of a single action.
What could make a successful, happily married man take a gun and shoot himself? What made a young artist on the brink of fame throw himself to his death?
These are the questions facing Chief Inspector Lamb and his assistant, Detective Sergeant Cogan. Neither victim left a note behind to explain what drove him to take his own life, and it appears that nothing untoward had occurred in the weeks preceding their deaths. Having briefly met both victims, Lamb struggles to connect the impression he gained of the men with their final actions, and his close attention pays off when a postmortem reveals some surprising results.
With one case now looking like a suspicious death, Lamb looks for links between the two men. All paths seem to lead to the enigmatic figure of Mrs. Isobel Amberley and a mysterious event that took place one winter's night in Vienna.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this less than satisfying period mystery from British author Eccles (Untimely Graves and 12 other titles in her Supt. Gil Mayo series), the suicide of artist Theodore Benton in 1909 London leads Scotland Yard to re-examine the death of Eliot Martagon, the owner of the gallery that displayed Benton's work. At the time, the police were unable to identify a motive for Martagon's blowing his brains out. The investigators Chief Insp. Philip Lamb, Oxford-educated and a believer in scientific detection, and his detective sergeant partner are remarkably slow to suspect foul play in either case, placing them several steps behind the reader from the outset. Just as their inquiry gets going, the action shifts to Vienna two decades earlier, to explore the history leading up to both deaths. Solid prose compensates only in part for flashbacks that dilute the suspense.