Murder by Numbers

November 1, 2020
A British detective battles to unmask a killer before his wife becomes victim No. 6. Donald Langham and his French wife, Maria, are in the middle of buying a cottage in Suffolk when Maria arrives at the office with a bizarre invitation to attend a death at the home of Maxwell Falwell Fenton. When she was just 18, Maria was infatuated with the much older artist until he asked her to pose nude and she fought him off with a poker. The couple drive to Fenton's crumbling estate to find that actress Holly Beckwith, George Goudge and his art critic wife, Hermione, poet Crispin Proudfoot, and Dr. Bryce are fellow invitees. Greeted by a butler, they each take numbered seats and are allowed to see Fenton, who is dying and almost unrecognizable. After excoriating and threatening them, he shoots himself. It seems like a simple suicide until the guests begin to be murdered in horrific ways in the order of their seat numbers. A call from DI Mallory, who finds the hanging death of Dr. Bryce fishy, involves Langham and Ralph Ryland, the partner in his detective agency, in a grim effort to halt the slaughter. As each guest is killed, Langham tries to protect the survivors while digging into Fenton's thoroughly reprehensible past for clues. A classic English mystery with plenty of unexpected plot twists.

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December 1, 2020
A dying artist invites several people to his stately home. Among them are book editor Maria Dupr� and her husband, novelist and PI Donald Langham. The reason for the invitation is a bit foggy, but one thing soon becomes clear: one of the invited guests has a secret worth killing to protect. Can Donald identify the murderer before Maria becomes one of the victims? The Langham and Dupr� novels (this is the seventh) feature fine writing and stories that are appropriately mysterious; but what really sells the books are the characters. Not just Donald and Maria, but the whole cast: villains, suspects, bit players, all fully drawn people. Brown, an award-winning sf writer, also has a real knack for historical mystery; his version of Britain in the 1950s, especially the social strata that existed at the time, is vividly re-created and striking in its verisimilitude.

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December 14, 2020
Brown’s solid seventh mystery featuring private detective and thriller writer Donald Langham and his wife, literary agent Marie Dupré (after 2019’s Murder Served Cold), opens on December 3, 1956, when Maria receives an invitation, marked with the number 6, to “attend a death” that evening. The sender is artist Maxwell Fenton, whom Maria struck and scarred with a fireplace poker after he made aggressive sexual advances decades before. At the artist’s Essex home, a gaunt and barely recognizable Fenton details his grievances against each of the six guests and then shoots himself. Witnessing his suicide seems to be Fenton’s revenge, until three of the guests he assembled are murdered in the order indicated by the numbers on their invitations to Fenton’s death. Maria is clearly in danger, but who’s committing crimes motivated by a dead man’s grudges? Langham investigates an actor friend of Fenton’s who disappeared around the time of the shooting. Though copious backstory slows the early chapters, clever plot twists soon spin the dramatic premise into a gripping tale. Agatha Christie fans will have fun. Agent: John Jarrold, John Jarrold Literary (U.K.).