Post After Post-Mortem by E C R Lorac

Post After Post-Mortem by E C R Lorac

A] twisty snake in the garden country-house mystery where] Lorac constructs a challenging puzzle and provides a marvelous glimpse into pre-WWII Oxford life. -- Booklist, Starred Review

Lorac keeps everything professional and smartly paced-- Kirkus Reviews

Now tell us about your crime novel. Take my advice and don't try to be intellectual over it. What the public likes is blood.

The Surrays and their five children form a prolific writing machine, with scores of treatises, reviews, and crime thrillers published under their family name. Following a rare convergence of the whole household at their Oxfordshire home, Ruth--middle sister who writes books which are just books-- decides to spend some weeks there recovering from the pressures of the writing life, while the rest of the brood scatter to the winds again. Their next return is heralded by the tragic news that Ruth has taken her life after an evening at the Surrays's hosting a set of publishers and writers, one of whom is named as Ruth's literary executor in the will she left behind.

Despite some suspicions from the family, the verdict at the inquest is suicide--but when Ruth's brother Richard receives a letter from the deceased which was delayed in the post, he enlists the help of CID Robert Macdonald to investigate what could only be an ingeniously planned murder.

Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958), a prolific writer of mystery fiction from the 1930s through the 1950s and a member of the famous Detection Club, used the pen name LORAC. Her books have mostly been forgotten since her death, but they need to be rediscovered as outstanding examples of classic British crime fiction from the golden age.