Publisher Description

"American anthropologist Penny Spring and British archaeologist Sir Toby Glendower have received a tantalizing invitation. Would they join old friend Jules Lefau on a three-week cruise among the Greek islands? Toby is wary of any invitation from the wily Lefau, but Penny sets off eagerly, children and grandchildren in tow. Arriving, the Springs find an astonishing assemblage of multimillionaires, entire dynasties and paramours included. Soon, however, Penny senses a dark purpose behind the festivities, especially following the sudden, mysterious death of patriarch Demetrios. Then Demetrios's heir is found murdered, his body floating in a swimming pool. Toby, summoned from Oxford, arrives in the Mediterranean just as another attempt on the life of an heir takes place. Clearly, someone is out to eradicate an entire clan, and only Penny and Sir Toby have the wits to pursue a perilous investigation to its alarming conclusion. ""A new Margot Arnold mystery is always a pleasure,"" writes the Chicago Sun-Times. ""She should be better known, particularly since her mysteries are often compared to those of the late Ngaio Marsh."" "

Kirkus US Review

Their twelfth crime-solving adventure (Dirge for a Dorset Druid, etc.) finds American anthropologist Dame Penny Spring, a lecturer at Oxford, and Sir Tobias Glendower, her archaeologist partner, with an invitation from old acquaintance Jules Lefau, a New Orleans millionaire, to cruise the Greek islands on his yacht Silver Spray. The trip is to celebrate the engagement of Lefau's son Vincent to Melissa, granddaughter of billionaire tycoon Demetrios Marolakis. Sir Toby, in the grip of gout and writer's block, and suspicious of Lefau's true motives, demurs, but Penny, her daughter-in-law Sonya (Sir Toby's daughter) and twin grandchildren, along with Lefau's daughter Juliette and her children, board Silver Spray. It's rapidly apparent that more than pleasure cruising is going on here, as Melissa's ailing grandfather dies, on his own island - natural causes? Then her father Georgiou is fond dead in Silver Spray's swimming pool. Sir Toby, alarmed by these events and by some input from Secret Service contacts, quickly joins the yacht party. He and Penny work to make sense of Georgiou's killing and the other murders that follow, as well as the puzzling presence of other shipping moguls, rumors of arms trading and secret ship passages, the hysteria of Georgiou's widow Olympia, and a host of other enigmas - all while trying to ensure the safety of their family. Their success is more than most benumbed readers will achieve, in this tangle of family relationships, political agendas, hidden identities and unpronounceable names. Smoothly written but ultimately a bore. (Kirkus Reviews)

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