Robert Forsyth
1 primary work • 2 total works
Book 3
Gentlemanly Robert Forsythe and his longtime PA "Sandy" Sanderson are sleuthing up a storm, investigating innocent victims who maybe weren’t so innocent after all…
No, Katherine St. Croix was not a hoofer, but she also wasn’t the pathetic, angelic starveling that the wealthy Dancer clan imagined. In fact, she was a talented con artist, selling her sob story while helping herself to the family jewels and silver. But what she is now is dead, her mutilated body found on the Dancer estate. It’s clear that one of the Dancers is similarly sitting on some sinister secrets, and Forsythe has been asked to poke around. He’s happy to do the favor, especially if he can stay alive while doing it.
And who would kill the village sawbones, nice Dr. Foster, not to mention his pretty wife? To answer that question, Sandy goes undercover, only to discover an embarrassment of suspects: it seems that half the folks in town had reason to loathe the doctor, not to mention his pretty wife. Can Sandy sift through them all? Sure...but she’ll risk her own life to do it.
With Adonis and Darling we are delighted to open the Robert Forsyth series, which was written primarily in the 1980s but carries all the flavors (er, flavours) that fans of British Golden Age mystery have come to expect.
Forsyth himself—a brilliant young barrister forced to give up the law in response to a dreadful and undisclosed disgrace—is very much in the Wimsey mold, which is to say that solving crimes is his personal passion but by no means his bread and butter. And though Forsyth lacks a Lugg-like manservant, he does have an indispensable and devoted secretary who shares the spotlight as the series develops. Structurally, both Adonis and Darling nod very distinctly in the direction of the classics: Darling, in fact, is set during a country-house weekend! And for all that Giroux (pseudonym of Canadian writer Doris Shannon) was clearly steeped in the genre, the Forsyth series is no museum piece, managing the neat trick of being both charmingly vivid and delightfully well bred.