About this item
Highlights
- TWO NAMES FOR DEATHBarney drives a Boston cab and is surprised to pick up a fare downtown who gives his own address as her destination.
- Author(s): E P Fenwick
- 200 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Mystery & Detective
- Series Name: Black Gat
Description
About the Book
An apparent suicide turns out to be murder in a mystery involving old family secrets and strange alliances. TWO NAMES FOR DEATH was originally published in 1945 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.Book Synopsis
TWO NAMES FOR DEATH
Barney drives a Boston cab and is surprised to pick up a fare downtown who gives his own address as her destination. Barney rents a room with the Shafft family--old Mrs. Shafft, her son Theo, and their granddaughter Edith--but has no idea that his customer is Lenore Bellane, Theo's wife and Edith's real mother. So when Lenore is found with two slashed wrists in her hotel room the next morning, Barney feels that something here just doesn't make sense.
The supposed-suicide doesn't make sense to Lt. Eggart either. He suspects murder. Lenore had been seen the day before with a Mystery Man who turns out to be her brother-in-law, Francis Bellane, but what motive could he have for killing the woman who seems to have meant so much to him? Why is Barney's boss, Mr. Bottman, getting involved? And how do the Shaffts figure into this?
Review Quotes
"Simply and subtly written, with knowable characters and plausibly complex motivations, this won't disappoint those who recognized Fenwick in Murder in Haste as a possible major contender."--Anthony Boucher, NY Times
"...a real corker of a classic mystery... an immensely enjoyable detective novel, complexly yet cleanly plotted with characters that actually live (until they die, that is). For someone who later excelled at the stripped down mid-century crime novel, Fenwick here produced a densely packed true detective tale with quite credible police investigation."--Curtis Evans, The Passing Tramp
"[She] can describe the best and worst of a character in one sentence, and can make a single gesture tell of years of accumulated pain or madness... Fenwick's novels are all beautifully plotted in human intimacy."-- Carol Cleveland, Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers