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Withering Heights: An Ellie Haskell Mystery - Hardcover

Buch 11 von 13: The Ellie Haskell Mysteries

Cannell, Dorothy

 
9780312343378: Withering Heights: An Ellie Haskell Mystery
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 031234337X ISBN 13: 9780312343378
Verlag: Minotaur Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Ellie Haskell---the formerly plump girl turned Thin Woman and happily married mother of three---is also a sometime sleuth and a Gothic romance addict. When her husband's young cousin, Ariel, turns up unexpectedly and begs Ellie to come to the Yorkshire moors to investigate some strange events at the house that her family has recently bought with their lottery winnings, Ellie can't resist---especially since Cragstone House sounds so much like the delightfully musty manors she reads about in books.
            And so Ellie and her husband set off for Yorkshire, accompanied by their irrepressible housekeeper and co-conspirator in crime solving, Mrs. Roxie Malloy, who happens to have a long-lost sister in the area. Things at Cragstone House are even more dire than Ellie expected. It's bad enough that the kindly cook, Mrs. Cake, has suffered a mysterious fall down the stairs, and a visiting vicar has keeled over dead while drinking a cup of tea, but one of the neighbors turns out to be Mrs. Cake's husband's glamorous old flame, whom Ellie finds more menacing than any cold-blooded killer. Ellie has always thought it would be wonderful to be the heroine of a Gothic romance, but now she's beginning to wonder: Will she be able to solve the mystery and get out of Bronte country with her life, and her marriage, intact?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Cannell, a mother of four, grandmother of ten, and owner of a King Charles Spaniel, was born in England and moved to the United States when she was twenty. After living in Peoria, Illinois, for years, she and her husband recently moved to Belfast, Maine. Her first Ellie Haskell novel, The Thin Woman, was selected as one of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Twentieth Century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. This is her eleventh mystery featuring the Ellie, whom Booklist describes as "part Miss Marple, part modern British mum."

Rezensionen

Ellie and Ben Haskell, along with their employee Mrs. Malloy, travel to Cragstone House in Yorkshire after Ariel Hopkins, daughter of Ben's cousin, Tom, asks for Ellie's help in investigating the strange, somewhat ghostly goings-on at the gothic manor. Tom and his wife, Betty, recently purchased the manor from the financially strapped Lady Fiona after they won the lottery. Betty is convinced Lady Fiona murdered her husband, who has disappeared. With the cook laid up with an injured ankle, Ben takes over the cooking, and Ellie handles the investigating. Ellie's life becomes more complicated when Ben meets up with an old girlfriend, and it seems the flame has been rekindled. Humor, quirky characters, and gothic underpinnings add to this eleventh in a series that will appeal to fans of Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity series, another family-centered British cozy. Sue O'Brien
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Near the start of Cannell's witty 13th Ellie Haskell mystery (after 2002's The Importance of Being Ernestine), Ellie's precocious 13-year-old niece, Ariel Hopkins, shows up at the Haskells' house, Merlin Court, one stormy night. Ariel, who's read too many gothic novels, has made her way from far-away Yorkshire, where her father, Tom, and stepmother, Betty, after winning the lottery, bought an Elizabethan mansion dubbed by Ariel "Withering Heights." Ariel claims that her wicked stepmom is obsessed with finding the body of Nigel Gallagher, the mansion's previous owner, whom Betty believes was murdered by his wife, Lady Fiona. Meanwhile, Ellie's oddball housekeeper, Mrs. Malloy, has wanted to mend fences with her estranged sister, Melody Tabby, who happens to live in the same town as the Hopkinses. So Ellie, husband Ben and Mrs. Malloy set off for Yorkshire to return Ariel to her parents and do a bit of investigating. The result is a funny, entertaining puzzler. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Chapter One
 
The storm hurled itself against the blurred contours of the house like an angry sea. Thunder roared, lightning flared, and the wind moaned, subsiding for a moment, then whooshing back with renewed ferocity. Clouds drifted across the bruised and bloated sky. It was early afternoon, but it might well have been the dead of night, fit only for human beasts of prey and the shadowy vigils of unholy spirits denied respite beneath a sanctified churchyard earth.
 
A tree branch brushed my arm with skeletal fingers as I scuttled across the courtyard after parking my car in the old stable. I screeched but did not panic, until a wildly flapping moon-colored thing made a dive for me as I neared the back door. Stumbling sideways, I still became entangled in its clammy folds. No bird this, but a shroud in search of a body. (Well . . . it could be I overreacted a little. My husband, Ben, claims I do that sometimes.) Having fought my way free, I reassessed the situation. Perhaps I was merely dealing with a sheet blown off the line. But a very nasty evil-minded sheet, for sure.
 
I was glad to step into my bright kitchen at Merlin's Court. Setting down my handbag and packages, I peeled off my raincoat and hung it on a hook in the alcove, then shook out my damp hair before weaving it back into a plait. Living on our part of the English coast, with its cliffs and rocky shoreline, we are prone to ferocious storms. But I had stayed up late the previous evening devouring the final gripping chapters of The Night Visitor, so it wasn't surprising that my imagination had started to run amuck on the drive home through the blinding rain.
 
Tobias the cat was seated on the broad window ledge, where he is never supposed to be. Typically, he looked at me as though I were the one about to get into trouble. Apart from his twitching whiskers there was no sign of life. All was neat and tidy, a kitchen on its best behavior. The copper pans hung in gleaming precision from their rack. Not a cup or saucer was out of place on the Welsh dresser. No stray crumbs on the quarry-tiled floor. No plastic horse tethered to the rocking chair. No sign or sound of husband or children. They had left for London in the Land Rover the previous morning with scarcely a backward wave. The twins, Tam and Abbey, age seven, and five-year-old Rose were to spend the next fortnight with Ben's parents. I didn't expect him home till early evening. The unaccustomed quiet was unnerving. Even my household helper, Mrs. Malloy, was conspicuous by her absence. Either she was occupied somewhere else in the house or she had thrown in the duster and gone home. Tobias gave me a smug look from the windowsill, as if to say how pleasant it was just being the two of us. I made myself a cup of tea and poured him a saucer of milk. He was right. What could be cozier? A woman alone with her cat, a cup of tea, and a plate of digestive biscuits.
 
The rain was still hammering down in a most unsuitable way for July as I seated myself at the scrubbed wood table. When a few minutes had gone by without a disembodied voice asking me to pass the sugar, I forgave the weather and was glad I had paid the second-hand bookshop in the village a visit. Under the Covers is a great place to forage for out-of-print titles. I had even grown quite keen on the smell of mildew that assaults one on entering its quiet gloom.
 
That day I had been buying not only for myself but also for the thirteen-year-old daughter of Ben's cousin Tom Hopkins. I'd only met young Ariel once, a couple of years previously, at my in-laws' flat above their greengrocer's shop in Tottenham. Ariel was in the company of her paternal grandmother. Oblivious to the tea tray with its assortment of jam tarts and iced cakes, she'd sat with feet and hands together, looking bored to rigor mortis. Seated next to her, I did my best to bridge the child-adult gap. Mercifully, just as I was ready to abandon all hope of drawing her out of the sulks and putting something like a smile on her face, she informed me somewhat fiercely--clearly daring me to approve--that she liked black-and-white movies: especially ones set in spooky old houses. I responded casually that I enjoyed them too and didn't object to novels of the same sort. What followed was a pleasant half-hour chat. Ariel stopped curling her lip and asked me for names of authors and titles. By the time her grandmother intimated it was time to leave, I was quite sorry to say good-bye to the whey-faced girl and asked if she would like me to sort through my collection and send her a couple of the books we had discussed. Unless her parents would object, I added responsibly.
 
"It'll be all right with Dad," said Ariel.
 
"And your mother?"
 
"Betty's my step." A toss of the sandy pigtails. "She won't care what you send me."
 
Not particularly heartened by this information, I got the Hopkinses' address from my mother-in-law and a few weeks later sent off a package of books, addressing it to Tom and Betty, with a letter enclosed. I never heard back from either of them. But Ariel wrote to thank me with an enthusiasm that suggested the genie had been let out of the ink bottle. On paper she was a different child, impish and insightful. She had loved The Curse of St. Crispin's so much that she was dying--underlined three times--to read everything else by its author. That was the beginning of our correspondence, and it became an enjoyable one for me. Over the course of the next eighteen months, I sent Ariel several more books and always looked forward to discussing them with her in letters.
 
Then something earthshaking happened to the Hopkins family: Tom and Betty won the lottery. They sold their semidetached home in a London suburb and bought a huge house somewhere in the north. Ben and I learned this information from his mother, but even she was not privy to their new address. And Ariel's grandmother, who would have been a likely source of this information, had died the previous year.
 
Now, on this day of storm, it was six months since I had heard from Ariel. I had been thinking about her quite a lot recently, wondering how she was adjusting to her new life. Given my favorite choice of reading matter, I knew all too well that the sudden acquisition of great wealth could be a murky matter, fraught with perils for the child heiress. Ben felt that if Tom and Betty did not want people to know their whereabouts, that was their prerogative. Even so, he had agreed to ask his mother, on his current visit, if she had any updated information on where the family of three had gone to earth.
 
There was always the chance, I had explained while looking fervently into his marvelous blue-green eyes, that Ariel was desperately hoping I would get back in touch with her. But I had not pressed the point. Ben isn't much of a fiction reader. He prefers cookery books, which is understandable, seeing that he has written half a dozen of his own, in addition to owning and managing a restaurant named Abigail's in our village of Chitterton Fells.
 
Pouring myself another cup of tea, I realized I'd finished all the biscuits. Time slips by so fast when one is Ellie Haskell; blissfully married to the handsomest man outside of a gothic novel, with three lively children and Tobias to round out the family. Having decided to take early retirement, Tobias is underfoot much of the day, meowing about how much better things were when he was young. As if on cue, he demanded a second saucer of milk.
 
"Don't interrupt," I told him sternly. "I am busy relaxing."
 
And now came another distraction. Mrs. Malloy entered through the hall door, wafting a feather duster. She was looking her majestic best in a purple taffeta dress and an enormous pair of rhinestone earrings that would have done her proud at a cocktail party hosted by a royal duchess, had Chitterton Fells gone in for such swanky affairs. Her jet-black hairdo with its two inches of white roots is always her chief fashion statement. She also goes in for iridescent eye shadow, lashings of mascara, brick-red rouge, and purple-passion lipstick. That's Mrs. Malloy. And, as I have said on occasion to Tobias, who admires her fondness for fur coats, all credit to her.
 
Nothing would induce Her Royal Personage to slop around as I was presently doing in an old green skirt and sweater and no makeup. She routinely takes me to task for not putting my best face forward, explaining that looking like a loaf of bread is no way to keep a husband when there are plenty of fancy cakes on little paper doilies out there. Regrettably, I always let this go in one ear and out the other, telling myself smugly that we can't all be slaves to fashion. Not being clairvoyant, I did not foresee the danger of ignoring such pearls of wisdom. Oh, woe to the woman who sticks her nose in a book and forgets that real life is not always destined for Happily Ever After.
 
"I thought you'd left for the day," I said, getting to my feet.
 
"What? Be drowned in that storm when no right-minded person would put a cat out in it?"
 
Tobias looked grateful. Had there been a saucer of milk handy, I am sure he would have offered her a slurp.
 
Her Mightiness began clattering around the kitchen in her six-inch heels, opening up cupboard doors as if hoping to surprise miniature burglars lurking behind the plates. The noise she made was not Beethoven to the ears, but then she has never been a woman to fade willingly into the next county.
 
Irritating as this can be, I've grown fond of her over the years. We've shared some good times and a number of adventures in which we have, more by luck than skill, managed to un...

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Verlag
Minotaur Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
031234337X
ISBN 13 
9780312343378
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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