A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Overview
by Ellen Nehr
LESLIE FORD – Sick Met by Moonlight. Colonel Primrose & Grace Latham #2. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1938. Dell #6, paperback, mapback version, 1943. In style Library, paperback, 1964.
Leslie Ford (a pseudonym of Zenith Brown. who additionally wrote as David Body, has typically been accused of being one of many main practitioners of the “had-I-but-known” college. and it’s true that an ideal many of those main and tension-spoiling statements seem in her novels. Nevertheless, shortsighted critics have missed her fastidiously delineated exploration of life amongst people who find themselves not too completely different from the common reader besides in the truth that, by way of familial associations, political affinity, or geographic accident, they invite greater than their fair proportion of homicide and well-bred mayhem.
That is the second journey of Colonel John T. Primrose and Sergeant Phineas Buck, one through which the unlikely however extremely profitable mixture of retired officer and retired enlisted man is teared with a thirty-eight-year-old widow, Grace Latham.
Grace is of a distinguished Georgetown household, and her elegant house varieties the backdrop for most of the books on this collection. Sick Met by Moonlight takes place in one other setting — April Harbor, Maryland, a summer season playground for an inbred group of upper-crust households, the place Grace and her family have been vacationing for years. Primrose and Buck are visitors at Grace’s cottage when she finds a neighbor useless of carbon-monoxide poisoning within the storage subsequent door.
An outdated romance, a troubled marriage, a brand new love affair, and relationships with the parents within the neighboring city are all woven collectively on this engrossing and charming story of affection and homicide.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and revealed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
