Now that Susan\u2019s back from Crete and her latest romance, her boss at Causton Books, Michael Flynn, wants her to work with Eliot Crace, a failed mystery author who\u2019s writing a sequel to the late Alan Conway\u2019s tales of detective Atticus P\u00fcnd, which she knows far too much about already. As she reads Eliot\u2019s first installment, Susan gradually becomes aware of something seasoned fans will have assumed all along\u2014that the central mystery and the leading suspects in P\u00fcnd\u2019s Last Case are all based on Eliot\u2019s family, whose matriarch, world-famous children\u2019s author Miriam Crace, died 20 years ago under circumstances that everyone involved insists weren\u2019t at all suspicious. Teased by the first and simplest of three key anagrams Eliot has sneaked into his manuscript, Susan asks him about all those parallels, whose revelation would surely offend the rest of the family and very likely endanger the big-ticket deal that Eliot\u2019s uncle, family estate manager Jonathan Crace, is negotiating over video rights to the Littles, Miriam\u2019s adorable franchise characters. The mystery Eliot\u2019s created around the fatal poisoning of Lady Margaret Chalfont broadly hints that Miriam was murdered as well. Susan\u2019s attempt to sift through the parallels in the unfinished manuscript and figure out who killed Lady Margaret and what light that knowledge may shed on the death of Eliot\u2019s grandmother is seriously upended when there\u2019s a second murder and DI Ian Blakeney identifies Susan as his prime suspect. No wonder she vows at the fadeout to have nothing more to do with Atticus P\u00fcnd: \u201cNever. Never again.\u201d Uh-huh.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now that Susan\u2019s back from Crete and her latest romance, her boss at Causton Books, Michael Flynn, wants her to work with Eliot Crace, a failed mystery author who\u2019s writing a sequel to the late Alan Conway\u2019s tales of detective Atticus P\u00fcnd, which she knows far too much about already. As she reads Eliot\u2019s first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2843,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}