Carola Dunn The Bloody Tower

The Bloody Tower

Carola Dunn

St. Martin's, Sept 2007, $23.95, 256 pp

ISBN: 9780312363062

The Honorable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher has been asked to do a series of articles about the Tower of London for an American magazine. It will be the first time she returns to work since the twins were born four months ago. People take a natural likening to Daisy and she gets a personalized tour of the Crown Jewels, interviews the people in power in the tower, learns about the feuds between the Yeomen Warders and the Hotspot officers, and is told the stories of the ghosts who haunt the lacee.

When she gets ready to leave, she comes across the murdered body of the chief Yeomen Warder with a partisan (pike) in his back and his neck broken. She gets someone to call the superintendent who calls her husband DCI Alex Fletcher, who is resigned to the fact that Daisy will once again be in the middle of a homicide investigation; but this time she walks away and is dragged back by the entreaties of two teens she befriended. She contributes to the investigation and hopefully with what she learns it will lead to the killer.

The latest Daisy Dalrymple mystery is as refreshing and entertaining as are the rest of the books in this delightful historical amateur sleuth police procedural combination. Points of views keep changing between the spouses who learn much of the same information from different sources in different manners. This is a perplexing case because everybody liked the victim and it is only when knowledge of the victim comes to light the Fletchers begin to even come to solving the case.

Harriet Klausner