cover image The Toy Cupboard

The Toy Cupboard

Lee Jordan. Walker & Company, $17.95 (187pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-5775-3

Frightening truths and evil intentions nearly destroy a likable young woman in this taut, expertly hewn mystery. Joanna Townsend, whose husband, Mike, is away on an art-buying trip, worries when she spies a man photographing her as she works in her sister Flora's London antiques stall. Upon returning to her flat, she is terrified by an intruder demanding to know Mike's whereabouts. Beaten up, she flees to the safety of Flora's to await Mike, who suggests that the assailant was probably after a pre-Columbian statuette he had bought from a thief. Mike prevails upon Joanna to smuggle the statuette into France, although the thought of entering her late parents' seaside home deeply upsets her. Meanwhile, Marcel Drac, the man sent to prison for the shotgun murder of her father, has been released. His wife had been Joanna's father's lover years before, and Drac has been planning more revenge. But against whom? The terrible answer, among several other surprises equally awful for Joanna, is not revealed until the gripping denouement. Deftly pulling together three subplots, the pseudonymous English author of Criss Cross provides heart-pounding drama with marvelously understated writing. (Sept.)