Synopses & Reviews
It's 1926, and Joe Sandilands is back from Ranipur, enjoying the frantic pleasures of Jazz Age London. Yet there is a darkness behind all the postwar gaiety. A woman has been discovered bludgeoned to death in her suite at the Ritz. A broken window and missing emerald necklace suggest that it is a burglary gone wrong. But the corpse is that of a much respected member of the British establishment, Dame Beatrice Joliffe, one of the founders of the Wrens; so Scotland Yard sends Joe to conduct a swift enquiry. Then, Joliffe's companion, an ex-chorus girl, falls from Waterloo Bridge at twilight, and two of the Dame's clique of eager young Wrens commit suicide.
Although these deaths make Joe suspect that Beatrice has been killed by someone close to her, he suddenly finds that the case is closed, and he is asked by his superiors to surrender his files. Against the background of a looming general strike and pressure from unseen governmental presence, Joe struggles on, picking his way through the political panic and rebelling against authority.
The fifth title in the Golden Dagger Award-winning series, The Bee's Kiss builds to a shattering solution.
Synopsis
A fifth installment in a Golden Dagger Award-winning series finds a returned Joe Sandilands enjoying Jazz Age London, until a high-profile bludgeoning death at the Ritz embroils him in an investigation complicated by three additional suspicious deaths and pressure by Scotland Yard to close the case. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
Synopsis
London. 1926. One war is over, another is beginning, and murder is sealed with a kiss....
At midnight she was ravishing: a tall redhead wearing emeralds and a low-cut dress. An hour later, in her room at the Ritz, she was dead, the jewels torn from her bludgeoned body. Thus begins Barbara Cleverlys ingenious novel, another masterpiece of suspense from the CWA Golden Dagger Award—winning author.
With the help of a former comrade-at-arms and a society girl turned constable, Scotland Yard Inspector Joe Sandilands enters into the private world of Dame Beatrice Jagow-Joliffe-a hive of state secrets and sexual extravagance.
But as The Dames affairs are exposed, the case takes a sudden, strange turn. Because what Sandilands is about to discover are deceptions that go far beyond salacious scandal to betrayals that strike at the heart of a nation . . . and the ruthless heart of a killer.
About the Author
Barbara Cleverly is the author of five novels of historical suspense, including The Damascened Blade, winner of the CWA Historical Dagger Award, The Last Kashmiri Rose, Ragtime in Simla, The Palace Tiger, and The Bees Kiss. She lives in Cambridge, England where she is now at work on the second Laetitia Talbot mystery, which Delta will publish in 2008.