Deadly Partners: A Kate Kinsella Mystery

Inefficient, gullible and inept: not promising attributes in a PI who runs her own agency. But Kate Kinsella, head of Medical and Nursing Investigations, has other, admirable skills that she puts to good use in this brisk and appealing British mystery. She should have known that something might be amiss when she was hired by elderly Elizabeth Forrester to find her missing nephew Nigel, co-owner of a hotel on the Isle of Wight. Why did Mrs. Forrester refuse to meet her? Why is beauteous Caroline Uxton, whom Kate met on the ferry to Wight, so anxious to help her with her inquiries? And why are three aged residents of the hotel so relentlessly nosy? Kate, accepting Caroline's offer of help in finding Nigel, becomes the prime suspect when Caroline is found bludgeoned to death in Nigel's tiny home. That eventuality galvanizes Kate into intelligent action; with the aid of her devoted and decidedly eccentric friend, funeral director Hubert Humberstone, she resolutely follows a paper trail and discovers con games, fraud, revenge--and Nigel. This fourth in the series to be published by Walker (after Deadly Practice) sustains a bleak, wintry atmosphere, keeps up a finely tuned sense of the ludicrous and tops it off with a heroine who is determined, feminine, bold and more than adequately flawed. (Jan.)