Walking Into Murder

WALKING INTO MURDER is a light-hearted mystery with a delightful setting and distinctive characters: wonderfully appealing amateur sleuth Laura Morland, an American Professor of Gender Studies; a country manor full of British eccentrics, and the Cotswolds, site of England's quaintest villages and most verdant countryside. Still smarting from her ex-husband's unexpected (if not entirely unwelcome) defection, Laura accepts an invitation to teach a seminar in London. First, she tests her new independence by walking the Cotswold Way. The walk soon takes stormy turns. Lost in thick fog, Laura is accosted by a man who may or may not be a murderer but who forces her to masquerade as his wife. Escorted at gunpoint to an ancient manor house by an aristocratic Englishman, she is confronted by a formidable grande dame, an outrageously rude child and a houseful of other theatrical personalities, any of whom could be the killer of the body Laura discovers in a bedroom - a body that perversely keeps changing its identity. Laura's curiosity is almost as uncontrollable as her over-curly hair, and she tackles the mystery with abandon, ably assisted by two teenagers: Catherine, a free-spirited American runaway whose involvement leads to a breath-taking confrontation on the moors and Nigel, a boy of multiple talents like mask-making and sculpture. The plot gets ever more tangled, the list of suspects longer, and Laura's verbal battles with her alternately charming and irritating would-be husband - to whom she is undeniably attracted - become more pointed. As the efforts of the villains to silence her become more frantic, Laura's strategies to escape them become more ingenious. With total disregard for the escalating danger, she vows to outwit them all. And she does. In a final dramatic scene, she zeroes in on the murderer, or it might be more accurate to say the murderer zeroes in on her.