This hilarious, clever and sharp-edged L.A. mystery explores murder among the rich and shallow. Good-hearted, witty animator Lucy Freers, a devotee of antique clothing, is trying not to let her head be turned by all the money her wealthy producer husband is making, but life hands her an even bigger challenge when her male nanny is found dead. The nanny was not just her ex-lover. He had a secret life that leads Lucy into the bizarre world of child actors and their greedy, mean parents. In this one, her bumbling sleuth Robert Amiss has been hired to modernize an inefficient, conservative, intellectual English journal that's modeled on the Economist.
Progress here involves a shocking takeover bid, rancid office politics and a wacky murder.
Amiss' sidekick in all this delicious hugger-mugger is, as usual, the loony, rude, bisexual and politically incorrect Baroness Jack Troutbeck. Cheating a country neighbor doesn't bother Martin Clay, a philosophy professor who thinks he's found a lost Dutch masterpiece, which his neighbor doesn't recognize and Clay believes he doesn't deserve. Frayn manages to turn academic art scholarship fascinating, thrilling and even sexy in one of the year's unlikeliest but most likable thrillers. Furst's protagonist Jean Casson is a producer of gangster movies who used to live the high life. That was before the Nazis occupied Paris, however, and Casson in 1941 is on the run from the Gestapo, dead broke, lonely and using a false identity.