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Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery | 
 enlarge | Author: G.m. Malliet
Publisher: MIDNIGHT INK
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 17357
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0738712485
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780738712482
ASIN: 0738712485
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
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Product Description
From deep in the heart of his eighteenth century English manor, millionaire Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk writes mystery novels and torments his four spoiled children with threats of disinheritance. Tiring of this device, the portly patriarch decides to weave a malicious twist into his well-worn plot. Gathering them all together for a family dinner, he announces his latest blow - a secret elopement with the beautiful Violet...who was once suspected of murdering her husband. Within hours, eldest son and appointed heir Ruthven is found cleaved to death by a medieval mace.Since Ruthven is generally hated, no one seems too surprised or upset - least of all his cold-blooded wife Lillian. When Detective Chief Inspector St. Just is brought in to investigate, he meets with a deadly calm that goes beyond the usual English reserve. And soon Sir Adrian himself is found slumped over his writing desk - an ornate knife thrust into his heart. Trapped amid leering gargoyles and stone walls, every member of the family is a likely suspect. Using a little Cornish brusqueness and brawn, can St. Just find the killer before the next-in-line to the family fortune ends up dead?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
Agatha Christie Would Be Rolling in Her Grave ... with Glee October 24, 2008
If you love traditional English murder mysteries, you'll fall in love with G.M. Malliet's Death of a Cozy Writer. It's a modern spin on an old favorite. The writing is clean and crisp with pitch perfect English humor and upper crust snobbery. Malliet is today's heir to Agatha Christie.
death of a cozy writer September 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Death of a Cozy Writer by G.M. Malliet is a superlative English mystery. It's witty, the use of language is superb, and when one gets to the last 100 pages, it cannot be put down. I think this work belongs in the same category as Dorothy Sayers and Dame Agatha Christie. I can't wait for Malliet's next book, "Death and the Lit Chic." If it is anything like this first novel, I will be overjoyed.
Death and the Chick Lit September 2, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Have to admit, I bought DEATH OF A COZY WRITER (in large part because it was reminiscent of the M.C. Beaton titles) and jumped the gun by skipping to the excerpt from DEATH AND THE CHICK LIT. This novel has a very cute opening, obviously parodying chick lit. Hope Kimberlee is the victim!! Anyway, the first pages promise a good, tongue-in-cheek excursion into the commercial publishing world. For a traditional British mystery a' la Agatha Christie with a contemporary twist and light romance, try Christmas is Murder: A Rex Graves Mystery by C.S. Challinor, by the same publisher.
Delightful British drawing room mystery August 20, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
G.M. Malliet's Death of a Cozy Writer is a good old-fashioned British drawing room mystery. The ill-fated writer of the book's title is Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk, whose best-selling series of Miss Rampling mysteries has left him rolling in pounds. Sir Adrian's favorite sport is altering his will, disinheriting one or another of his four children in response to real or perceived slights, or for exhibiting questionable taste, among innumerable other possible offenses--torturing them by playing a sort of Russian roulette with their inheritances. Eager to see them all squirm simultaneously and in close quarters, he invites his brood to Waverly Court, Adrian's 18th-century estate in Cambridgeshire, to celebrate his impending nuptials to a woman all four assume will be a British version of Anna Nicole Smith. The invitations prompt the expected amount of shock and complaint. The get-together itself proves to be murderous.
Death of a Cozy Writer is the first in a new series featuring Detective Chief Inspector St. Just of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary and Sergeant Fear. The crime-fighting pair are not introduced, however, until we are some one hundred pages into the book, after a crime has been committed. And when St. Just and Fear do appear we are not told that much about them. Some details emerge: Fear has a daughter; St. Just has a cat aptly named Deerstalker. But while the other characters in the book are described in great detail--the malevolent Sir Adrian and his scheming brood, the help at Waverly Court--the detectives themselves are not fleshed out. This seems odd, as it is St. Just and his right-hand man who will have to anchor the series as its recurring characters, long after the Beauclerk-Fisks have been left on their own to run through their inheritances. It is interesting that the author has elected to breathe life into characters who will (presumably) be replaced in subsequent outings rather than beefing up her portrayal of St. Just.
Malliet's writing is lovely:
"Natasha admired the woman's self-possession. It was an excellent impersonation of aristocracy putting the revolting masses back in their place. Natasha, who had done her own research, found the act nearly pitch-perfect--for an act it was, she was certain. She wouldn't have put it past Lillian to have arrived at breakfast dressed in jodhpurs, cracking a whip against her highly polished boots, despite the absence of a stables for forty miles or more. Instead, Lillian had opted for the simple wool sheath bedecked with a king's ransom in pearls at neck and wrist: the uniform of the bored society matron. But not, Natasha recognized, quite the done thing for breakfast in a country manor house."
And the mystery certainly kept me guessing until all was revealed in the requisite drawing room scene at the book's end. (I am left confused about one issue I should have liked tied up, though, having to do with the identity of Sir Adrian's secretary.) All in all a delightful read. I look forward to more in the St. Just series.
-- Debra Hamel
Superlative Debut Mystery Series July 14, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Let us begin this review with a blunt declaration: G.M. Malliet can WRITE. And, more vitally, she can tell a story.
The plot of Death of a Cozy Writer revolves around a wealthy, aging aristocrat's will, a storyline harkening back to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's King Lear. Ms. Malliet's novel's central conceit is a British detective procedural that gently skewers the Cozy mystery sub-genre within an English country house setting. Familiar ground, brilliantly re-traversed. Moreover, Malliet manages to honor the sacred concord between mystery writer and reader by faithfully observing the requisite genre conventions, but in her own quirky, tongue-in-chic style.
The author uses the early chapters to depict the various characters with wit and unusual insight. She then deposits them at the nimbly executed meal en famille, a model of nuanced familial interaction and serial revelation. Once the estimable DCI St. Just and obligatory sidekick are introduced into the mix, the pace quickens and the reader is catapulted into a dizzying vortex of misdirection, surprise, and, echoing Greek tragedies, recognition and reversal. So sure, so authoritative is Malliet's grasp of character, plot, and convention as she propels the intricate plot to conclusion, I felt I had witnessed a display of narrative virtuosity equal to that of any first rate mystery writer's very best work.
Appetite whetted, I avidly await the gifted G.M. Malliet's next literary outing. Perhaps she will even include a "Death of an Amazon Reviewer" book in this promising series. Hmmm, I better hide the cutlery......
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