Death Descends on Saturn Villa

Starred review from January 11, 2016
Set in London in 1883, Kasasian’s exceptional third outing for personal (i.e., private) detective Sidney Grice (after 2015’s The Curse of the House of Foskett) opens on a somber note, with a preface by Grice explaining that he had to finish the account of their current case written by his ward, March Middleton, because she has been “lost to this world.” Then, in a flashback, March reads a letter dated 1882 from a woman warning her to leave Grice’s home and suggesting he murdered her mother. While the reader is reeling from the implications of that reveal, a flashback to 1876 recounts the horrific fate of Marjory Gregory, who inexplicably slashed herself to death, but whose husband, who witnessed her end, insisted that she was murdered more than four years earlier. These teasers are but a prelude to a series of bizarre events that result in March apparently hacking to death a newly found relative. The Grand Guignol plot line is leavened with laugh-out-loud passages showcasing both Grice’s literalness and disregard for social niceties.

January 15, 2016
Victorian detective Sidney Grice takes on a new client: his own young ward. March Middleton believes she has no family. Her mother died at March's birth, and her father was recently murdered. He left March in the care of her godfather, Sidney Grice, who gives her a home but never stops ridiculing her inferior intelligence, her plainness, and her cigarette-sneaking, gin-sipping ways. Even so, March isn't altogether unhappy with Mr. G, and together they've solved some unusual cases. While he's investigating a murder in Yorkshire, she's as pleased as she is surprised by a letter from Ptolemy Travers Smyth, who claims to be her cousin and invites her to dinner at his home, Saturn Villa. As a reference, he offers Inspector George Pound, whose ring March secretly wears next to her heart. But Pound's recovering from a stab wound, and rather than trouble him, March trustingly heads out alone to the villa to meet Smyth, who begs that March call him Uncle Tolly and stay overnight. He also hints that Grice plans to kill her. Before March can find out why, Tolly dies horribly, and March, unaccountably ill and hallucinating badly, isn't sure she didn't kill him. Tolly's valet summons the police, and only the trifling fact that Tolly isn't really dead clears March's name--until a series of actual murders puts her in as much peril as her mysteriously altered mental state. Her guardian uses such clues as wax, dust, a woodlouse, a couple of eyelashes, and a pickled puppy's head to link the recent deaths to disturbing events from March's past. But can even Grice's keen intellect and perceptiveness about everything but his own foibles save March from the gallows? Despite occasionally overworked jokes and a disappointingly abrupt ending, Kasasian (The Curse of the House of Foskett, 2015, etc.) surpasses Grice's first two cases with a bizarre, clever, and constantly surprising whodunit.

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February 1, 2016

After her godfather, Sidney Grice, London's greatest detective, travels to Yorkshire for a case (even though he rarely leaves the city), a bored March Middleton is lured to Saturn Villa in Highgate to reunite with a long-lost relative. March is unfamiliar with her family's history and is convinced Ptolemy Hercules Arbuthnot Travers Symth is her great-uncle. When "Uncle Tolly" is murdered, March needs Sidney to uncover the truth and save her from the gallows. VERDICT The third outing in this Victorian series (after The Curse of the House of Foskett) stars a clever, twisty plot and entertaining characters. Not just another Sherlock Holmes pastiche, this series has its own allure that will attract fans of Will Thomas, Alex Grecian, and David Morrell.

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