Death Called to the Bar
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Queen's Inn is London's youngest and most fashionable Inn of Court. On 29th February 1902, at a Feast, senior barrister Alexander Dauntsey collapses into his soup and dies. He has been poisoned. Soon after his friend Woodford Stewart is shot dead, and Lord Francis Powerscourt is summoned to discreetly investigate the matter of the murdered barristers.
His inquiries take him into the heart of legal London where the wills of the dead can reveal the crimes of the living. It takes him to the heart of a troubled marriage where lack of children imperils everything. And it takes him to Calne, a mysterious house in the country where the glorious past is boarded up and the treasures of generations hide beneath the dustsheets. There are many suspects: a jealous wife, a mistress fearful of being jilted, a work colleague beaten to the senior role in the Inn and a cuckolded husband who writes books about poisons. Powerscourt himself is put in grave danger before he finally solves the mystery of Death Called to the Bar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Dickinson's well-written fifth historical set in turn-of-the-20th-century Britain (after 2005's Death of a Chancellor), Lord Francis Powerscourt investigates the death of a junior "bencher," Alexander Dauntsey, who falls face down into his soup at a formal dinner held at one of London's Inns of Court ("a trickle of blood ran down his chin to join the beetroot broth, Borscht Sanguinaire rather than Borscht Romanov"). When the other benchers close ranks, Powerscourt must rely on the inn's lesser lights and his extensive roster of in-laws for leads. His questions reveal a number of people who may have had a motive for poisoning Dauntsey, but few with the opportunity. While Dickinson may not provide enough clues for the reader to unravel the mystery behind Dauntsey's murder, the rich cultural background (e.g., lively commentary on what is still a superlative art collection, the Wallace, as well as on a stately home that resembles Knole, the seat of the Sackville-Wests) will please Anglophiles.
