The Dying of the Light

Playwright Augustus Maltravers, last seen in The Book of the Dead , encounters murder and festering passions in the Cornish fishing village of Porthennis, where his actress girlfriend is performing in the renowned summer theater. Elderly sculptor Martha Shaw is crushed to death by two tons of granite--her work-in-progress. Though her death is initially labeled an accident, her lover, failed poet Ruth Harvey, thinks otherwise, but when Ruth confides her suspicions to her friends, other members of the well-known Porthennis School of artists, they try to silence her. Taking an interest in the case at the urging of a local psychic who also believes that foul play is involved, Maltravers traces the group's ties back to the theater's founder, a woman who disappeared 40 years previously while swimming off the coast. The eccentricities of the surviving artists complicate the investigation before Maltravers's probing into the past flushes a contemporary murderer. Richardson has produced another civilized and cultured mystery, depicting in fine detail the atmosphere of a seaside holiday town. (June)