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DIE FOR LOVE
by Elizabeth Peters
Avon Books, January 2002
346 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0380731169


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jacqueline Kirby traded the bright lights of the East Coast for a post at Coldwater College in Nebraska, on the premise that she would succeed the elderly chief librarian upon his death. Unfortunately, he has upset her plan by living on, and she is desperate to get back to the East Coast, even for a short vacation.

Kirby's run-ins with the IRS are notorious, so she decides that to be able to deduct her trip to the Historical Romance Writers convention in New York, she will have to begin an historical mystery.

Arriving at the convention, she encounters the "usual suspects": Valerie Vanderbilt, whom Kirby has known in the past as an academic and who is desperate to keep her identity as a romance writer a secret; Valerie Valentine -- the "Queen of Love" -- a young beauty so dim she has to be practically kept under house arrest so that her stupidity won't be revealed to the public and no one will realize that she couldn't possibly have written her oh-so-popular novels; a Fabio-like figure whose mysteries are actually written by two middle aged housewives; and the essential besotted fan. Peters may think it a clever conceit to name two of the main characters Valerie, but it is very confusing for the reader.

Presiding is "Aunt Hattie," the agent for the biggest figures in romance writing. She takes an unheard of 25% commission from her authors and skims from their royalties. Rather than exposing this scam and helping other authors, Kirby plans to blackmail Aunt Hattie into

representing her barely started book.

At the opening banquet, Dubretta, a local gossip columnist dies, supposedly of heart failure. Kirby suspects that it was actually murder. For much of the book, the "who was intended to get what wine glass" is played, something that was probably a clichÈ in 1930.

As Kirby persists in her investigation, she becomes ruder and ruder and more and more aggressive. When her English professor lover follows her to New York, she treats him like some sort of slave.

The case begins to come together when the besotted fan is murdered in Central Park. The solution is one of those "Perry Mason" endings where the "detective" badgers the guilty person into a confession. As with "Perry Mason," one thinks that if the culprit had the sense to shut up, nothing could really be proved.

Kirby is thoroughly dislikeable and totally self-involved. She snarls her way through the book, autocratically ordering around anyone who crosses her path.

Were it not for the identity of the author (Peters is actually Barbara Michaels), one would conclude that this is a first mystery that needs a lot of work.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, February 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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