Murder Most Fashionable

Darlene Money was a writer in Mississauga, Ontario.

Joy Carroll has written seventeen books, including best-selling mass-market paperbacks Proud Blood and Pride’s Court. This original paperback ought to sell well, too, combining as it does the qualities of slick women’s fiction and the classic mystery novel.

Six glamorous and successful women who were once classmates at an expensive Vancouver private school hold a reunion at the Paradise Island spa owned and operated by one of them, Lily. The motive of the first murder seems obvious: Alice has written a book exposing the secrets of the other five, and one of them must be trying to stop her from publishing it. But which one? Then Henry, an old flame of Lily’s who just happens to be a policeman suspended from duty, turns up and launches an unofficial investigation; as one after another of the women are slain without apparent motive, Henry wonders if a crazed mass murderer is loose on Paradise Island. Suspense increases until Henry solves the case, exposing the murderer in the gathering of all suspects characteristic of the classic mystery.

As in many murder mysteries, coincidence plays an important part in Murder Most Fashionable, but never to the point of straining the reader’s credulity. It is a well-plotted, highly suspenseful mystery novel that meets the standards of the genre.