A Puzzle in a Pear Tree - Hardcover

Buch 4 von 18: Puzzle Lady Mysteries

Hall, Parnell

 
9780553802429: A Puzzle in a Pear Tree
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553802429 ISBN 13: 9780553802429
Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

With Christmas just around the corner, Puzzle Lady Cora Felton is far from feeling the usual holiday cheer, thanks to her role as one of the Eight Maids A-Milking in the local holiday pageant, the attentions of cruciverbalist and pest Harvey Beerbaum, and the murder of an actress in front of an entire audience of witnesses.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Parnell Hall is the author of the acclaimed Stanley Hastings mystery novels and the Steve Winslow courtroom dramas, as well as three previous Puzzle Lady mysteries, A Clue for the Puzzle Lady, Last Puzzle & Testament, and Puzzled to Death. Nominated for the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Lefty Awards, he lives in New York City, where he is working on his fifth Puzzle Lady mystery, With This Puzzle I Thee Wed.

Aus dem Klappentext

The Chicago Sun-Times crowns Parnell Hall s Puzzle Lady mysteries a joy for lovers of both crosswords and frothy crime detection...Cora Felton is a lovable and unique sleuth. Now the crime-solving powers of the inimitable Cora and her clever niece, Sherry Carter, are put to the ultimate test as they square off against a yuletide killer who hides within the white-and-black shadows of an acrostic....

A Puzzle In A Pear Tree

 Tis the season to be jolly, but Cora Felton, shanghaied into The Twelve Days of Christmas as a most reluctant maid-a-milking, has every right to feel like a grinch. When someone steals the partridge from the pear tree and replaces it with a cryptic puzzle she has no hope of solving, it s almost more than the Puzzle Lady can bear. But then smug crossword creator Harvey Beerbaum solves the acrostic, and it turns out to be a poem promising the death of an actress. This is more like it! Could the threat be aimed at Cora and her thespian debut? Or at Sherry, one of the ladies-dancing? Or at Sherry s nemesis, the pageant s predatory lead, Becky Baldwin?

Cora and Sherry barely have time for a mystery, what with trimming Christmas trees and buying Christmas presents, but rehearsals go on, under police protection--until a killer strikes elsewhere in a most unexpected manner.Ordinarily Cora Felton would be delighted to have two murders to solve. But this time she finds herself vying with a visiting Scotland Yard inspector who appears to have an all-too-personal stake in solving the crimes. Cora does too when her own niece becomes a prime suspect and the murderer strikes again.

Is someone trying to shut down the Christmas pageant? Cora would be only too happy if that were the case, but she fears the secrets lie deeper. Now she is interviewing witnesses, breaking into motel rooms, finding evidence, planting evidence, and having a merry old time. In fact, she would be perfectly happy--if this wasn t turning out to be a Christmas to die for!

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Chapter 1

"No, no, no," Rupert Winston cried, silencing the piano and vaulting up onto the stage with all the spry grace of a much younger man. Rupert tugged at his turtleneck, a habit he had when not particularly pleased. Which, in Cora Felton's humble opinion, was almost all the time. In the few rehearsals she'd had, Cora had come to detest the "innovative and gifted" director, as the Bakerhaven Gazette had termed him, who had left the "stifling constraints of the Broadway stage" in order to "ply his craft in the liberating atmosphere of an enlightened village."

Although no linguist, Cora Felton didn't have to be hit over the head with a condescending remark to recognize one. Rupert

Winston had Cora's back up before she'd even met him. Being tapped to appear in Rupert's Christmas pageant was the last thing in the world Cora Felton wanted. Had she been able to think of any polite way to get out of it, Cora would have done so.

Had she known what rehearsals would be like, an impolite way would have sufficed.

"Miss Felton." Rupert Winston extracted his hand from his black turtleneck, entwined his long, slender fingers together, and rolled his steel-gray eyes to the heavens, as if invoking the deities to witness his tribulations in dealing with mere mortals, and inferior ones at that. "You are a milkmaid. A hearty, robust milkmaid, fresh from the fields, sunny and bright and imbued with a lust for life. If you are to sing the solo line, I have to hear the solo line. You cannot mumble it into your sleeve."

Cora Felton set down her wooden milking stool, fixed the director with an evil eye. Rupert Winston was, in Cora's humble opinion, one of those marginally famous men who affected rudeness as a sign of genius. The good citizens of Bakerhaven might be taken in, but not Cora. Particularly since Rupert invariably singled her out for abuse. Cora, who appeared in breakfast cereal commercials as the Puzzle Lady, suspected this was largely because she was on TV and he wasn't.

Cora was sorely tempted to remind Rupert that she hadn't got a sleeve, this wasn't the dress rehearsal, and her milkmaid costume had yet to be sewn. She stifled the impulse and glanced around the stage, where the seven other maids a-milking stood holding their stools. "You're absolutely right, Rupert," she said sweetly. "I'm totally wrong for this part. I'm sure any of the other milkmaids could do better. I understand completely why you'd wish to replace me."

Rupert Winston looked shocked. "Miss Felton. Did I say any such thing? Of course not. You're perfect for the part. It's just a question of pulling a performance out of you."

Cora bit back a groan. Were there any way to agree with this fool and get on with it, Cora would have done so, but she knew from experience Rupert loved to pontificate. Under the guise of giving direction, he could run through his entire Broadway resume at the drop of a hat. Already, she could see the other actors emerging from the wings to listen. They soon filled the stage. The piece was The Twelve Days of Christmas, complete with pipers piping, drummers drumming, and so on. Cora could barely calculate how many actors were in the show, let alone the odds of all of them ever doing it right.

"I'm not perfect for the part," she protested. "I'm dead wrong for the part. I'm way too old. Just like the rest of your milkmaids--no offense, ladies--but your maids a-milking should be rosy-cheeked country girls in fetching peasant blouses."

"You're saying you can't work without your costume?"

"No, I'm saying someone else should be wearing it. It's just bad casting." Cora pointed stage left, where her niece, Sherry Carter, stood in a cluster of nine attractive young women. "Look at your ladies dancing. They're all young and pretty. They should be the lusty milkmaids, and we old biddies should be the refined ladies dancing."

Rupert didn't get mad. The director never got mad. Instead, he exhibited, as he always did, a tolerant amusement at the misguided views of the unenlightened.

"Yes, Miss Felton," he replied. "That is how it is usually cast. Which is precisely why I have not done so here. This skit is deliberately 'miscast,' as you would characterize it, for, one would hope, humorous effect. Which, as you might have gathered, is the same reason for so many entrances and exits. Which is also why rehearsal time is so crucial. I hope I don't have to spend too much of it reassuring you that you are right for your part."

"I thought you were the one telling me I wasn't doing it right," Cora countered.

Rupert Winston chuckled. "Well, there is a huge difference between not doing it right and not being right for it. Trust me, you're right for it."

Harvey Beerbaum stuck his oar in, as the annoying, pedantic cruciverbalist was wont to do. "Come on, Cora," he chided. "If I can be a lord a-leaping, surely you can be a maid a-milking."

That was hard to argue with. The sight of bald, portly Harvey leaping about the stage was so ridiculous, if he was willing to make a fool of himself, how could anyone else object?

"Can we get on with it?" Becky Baldwin griped. "I'm meeting a client in half an hour."

"Did you hear that?" Rupert Winston said. "Becky has only a half an hour. So this is hardly time to be worried about our motivation."

Cora Felton bit her lip. She hadn't said a damn thing about her motivation, but she couldn't point that out to Rupert without starting another argument, which would seem boorishly insensitive and inconsiderate, since Becky had to go.

Cora resented that too. Becky Baldwin--young, attractive, and as fashionable as ever in a scoop-neck sweater and pale blue skirt and vest--might have actually had a client, but as far as Cora was concerned, Becky's pointing it out served only to remind everyone that she was a lawyer on the one hand, and a Star on the other.

Which, in the pageant, she was. Becky had been cast as the young woman in the song, the one who receives all the season's bounty. In Rupert Winston's version of the piece, Becky started each verse alone on stage, singing "On the whatever day of Christmas, my true love gave to me," and then reacting to the stampede of gifts that surrounded her. A plum role, one that Cora felt should by rights have gone to her niece. But, as always happened between Sherry and Cora, Cora was the one pushed out front.

Rupert turned to the piano, where Mr. Hodges, the high school music teacher, was dutifully waiting to play. "You don't have to go anywhere, do you?"

"I have a chorus rehearsal at four-thirty."

"Oh, for goodness' sakes!"

Mr. Hodges, a thin-faced, sallow man with a hawk nose, did not take kindly to the suggestion that he would be responsible for breaking up rehearsal. "The Twelve Days of Christmas is not the only piece in the pageant, you know," he retorted huffily. "The bulk of the show still happens to be the school choir."

"Yes," Rupert snorted. "Standing and singing. They don't move. What's to rehearse?"

Mr. Hodges had no desire to get into that argument. "We lose the gym at four-fifteen anyway for varsity practice," he pointed out acidly.

The Christmas pageant was being performed on the stage in the Bakerhaven High gymnasium, where it shared the space with the basketball team. It also shared the stage with the upcoming high school production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, so the English village square Becky Baldwin was performing in looked suspiciously like a Russian country...

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Verlag
Bantam Dell Pub Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553802429
ISBN 13 
9780553802429
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
308
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0553584340 ISBN 13:  9780553584349
Verlag: Bantam, 2003
Softcover