Blood Will Tell: A Dorothy Martin Mystery

Dams’s delightful 17th Dorothy Martin mystery (after 2015’s The Gentle Art of Murder) takes the American schoolteacher and her retired policeman husband, Alan Nesbitt, to a police conference in Cambridge, England. While exploring (the fictitious) St. Stephen’s college in the historic town, Dorothy gets lost and winds up in a supposedly locked science lab, where she spots a pool of blood on the floor. When she returns with help, the floor is completely clean, and Alan questions whether Dorothy really saw anything amiss. A determined Dorothy persuades friendly local detectives to look into the matter, though it appears at first that the incident was a student prank involving a lab animal. When Dorothy’s snooping leads to a dirty scalpel that’s later proven to be covered in human blood, the plot thickens. Anglophiles will relish every aspect of St. Stephen’s and its gorgeous Cambridge surroundings. [em]Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron Agency. (Feb.) [/em]