My pick this week for Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books comes from books that I read in 1991.#7 in Antonia Fraser's Jemima Shore mysteries, published in 1990, THE CAVALIER CASE combines love of history with her ability to write engaging mysteries. I was a history teacher at the time, loved English history, and just becoming addicted to crime fiction, so this fitted the bill for me.
Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)
Publisher's Weekly
In her seventh Jemima Shore novel, Fraser deftly brings together her two previously separate fortes, history and mystery. In an unusual premise, long-dead viscount and Cavalier poet Decimus Meredith repeatedly exits his portrait on the wall to haunt his 20th-century heirs.
The contemporary viscount, suave and manipulative ladies' man and tennis star ''Handsome Dan'' Meredith, has unconventional visions about keeping up expensive Lackland Court. Dan would model its grounds into very different kinds of courts, where he and his fashionable friends would serve tennis balls and be served ''designer drinks'' between matches.
Shore, a TV commentator, agrees to create a program about ghosts in country houses at the same time that she falls in love with a portrait she has been lent, which, coincidentally, features Decimus Meredith. Meanwhile, preparations for a costumed Cavalier Celebration at Lackland Court are upset by a death, a startling discovery and an attack by the resident ghost. Jemima's clearheaded sleuthing sorts out the many suspects, some of whom fit historical roles in the family history.
2 comments:
Kerrie - Oh, this is a series I must look into! I love history too ('though I've never taught it), and of course, well, crime fiction... Thanks for reminding us it's out there.
I used to love this series, and must have read this one when it first came out, though have no memory of it. I should look it out again, I thought they were great books, and Jemima Shore was a splendid heroine.
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