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CORPSE DE BALLET ... TERPSICHORE
by Ellen Pall
St. Martin's Minotaur, June 2001
276 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312280335


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Juliet Bodine gets more than she bargained for when she agrees to help her friend Ruth Renswick choreograph a ballet based on Dickens's Great Expectations. Ruth thinks that Juliet, who writes novels under the pen name Angelica Kestrel-Haven, is the perfect person to help her sort out the connections between the storyline of the ballet and the steps. Juliet, looking for a reason to avoid working on her next novel, agrees to visit the dance studio. Once she arrives, however, she witnesses a series of injuries and a suspicious death, and she takes it upon herself to find out which one of the dancers is making trouble.

As one might expect from a novel that invokes Terpsichore, the Muse associated with dance, the world of the ballet studio and the lives of the dancers are at the center of the book. The reader gets a thorough education in how a ballet goes together, how the choreographer works with the dancers to create the movements, and the hours upon hours of practice that are involved. The dancers are dedicated to their craft but extremely competitive, and Juliet learns enough about their rivalries and romantic relationships to be suspicious when accidents start to happen.

Juliet is a fun, opinionated character who carries the novel well. She is easily distracted from writing; listing the skills she picked up while working on her previous novels (speaking Chinese, sight-singing, coding HTML) is a running joke throughout the book. In this case, at least, the events in her personal life also seem to help her write; it's interesting to see how a conversation or an incident will work its way into her fiction. Although the ballet mystery is solved, Juliet's personal life is full of loose ends, including an ex-husband who won't stop contacting her and an attractive police officer who was involved with the case. Corpse de Ballet is a great start to a series that seems to have more than enough momentum to take on eight more Muses.

Reviewed by Kathleen Chappell, March 2002

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