DAVID WILLIAMS – Wedding Treasure. Mark Treasure #8. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1985. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1985. Avon, US, paperback, 1987.

   Mark Treasure is a London-based investment banker, but over the years, he and his actress wife Molly found themselves involved in 17 cases of murder that needed solving. In Wedding Treasure it is the death of a would-be bride’s father, a loutish cad of a man, who is murdered, apparently by being hit in the head by an errant golf ball.

   The killer’s intention was to have his victim’s death put down as a most unfortunate accident, but as Treasure quickly realizes, no golf ball in the ordinary course of events can do as much damage as this one is supposed to have done. There is no shortage of suspects. If the dead man had formally objected to the wedding, the bride would have had to wait ten more years before she could collect a sizable inheritance.

   It does not help that the groom-to-be is a little too slick to be the person he pretends to be. There are a lot of characters in the story, some more important than others, and as I said earlier, there are more than enough motives to go around.

   The telling is both bright and witty, in the finest British tradition, and many, many mostly obvious red herrings. The ending, unfortunately, is the weakest part of the book. I had to skip over all of the financial matters; all I wanted and needed was whodunit, not necessarily why. That’s what detectives who are also financial bankers are for, and Mark Treasure fits the bill perfectly