Capacity for Murder: A Professor Bradshaw Mystery

Pajer’s entertaining third Professor Bradshaw mystery (after 2012’s Fatal Induction), set in 1903, takes “the electrical forensic investigator,” who’s also a licensed private detective, to the Healing Sands Sanitarium in the remote coastal town of Ocean Springs, Wash. Dr. Arnold Hornsby, Healing Sands’ owner, wants Bradshaw to investigate the electrocution death of his son-in-law, David Hollister, in an electrotherapy machine. Bradshaw quickly discovers that the machine worked properly and that the death was no accident. With only four guests at the sanitarium (rich but unhappy miner Zebediah Moss; con man Arnold Loomis, whom Bradshaw already knows; sickly Frederick Thompson; and Thompson’s flirtatious wife, Ingrid), the suspect pool is small. Pajer gets good mileage from odd health notions of the day, and her stubborn, resourceful detective finds more than one clever murder to solve. (June)