Katherine Hall Page, The Body in the Ivy

The Body in the Ivy

Katherine Hall Page

Morrow, Nov 2006, $23.95

ISBN 0060763655

On a privately owned New England island, bestselling author Barbara Bailey Bishop hires Faith Fairchild to cater a college reunion celebration. Barbara and her classmates including her twin Helene known as Prin attended Ivy school Pelham College in the late 1960s; her name back then was Elaine Prince. In 1970, Prin fell from a campus tower to her death in what the police ruled was a suicide the night before graduation.

Faith has always felt otherwise that one of these eight killed her sibling who was universally desired and loathed. Now she has everyone who could have committed the act stranded on the island where she plans to learn the truth. The first death is considered an accident, but those that follow leave the dwindling survivors panicked as there is no escape until there is none.

In the sixteenth Fairchild amateur sleuth (can Faith still be considered an amateur, pay aside?) Katherine Hall Page pays obvious homage to Agatha Christie by modernizing And Then there Were None. The story line is fast-paced and filled with rising tension as one by one the attendees are dying with no way off the island (a storm adds to their isolation). As Faith, the only outsider, investigates while trying to remain alive, readers will appreciate this superior tale that ends with a Christie style twist.

Harriet Klausner