ROBERT BARNARD — At Death’s Door. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1988. Dell, paperback, 1989. First published in the UK: Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1988.

    — Death and the Chaste Apprentice. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1989. Dell, paperback, 1990. First published in the UK: Collins Crime Club, 1989.

   In At Death’s Door, Cordelia Mason, the daughter of actress Dame Myra Mason, is writing a tell-all biography of her (still-living) mother and decides to visit her half-brother, who is caring for their senile father, once a successful novelist. Cordelia was the outcome of a brief affair between the two, and wants to go through her famous father’s private papers from that period.

   Her mother, anxious not to be painted as “Myra Dearest,” also visits, to keep Cordelia from going through with her plans. Shortly after a heated argument between mother and daughter, Dame Myra is found murdered.

   In The Chaste Apprentice, the Ketterick arts festival is staging an Elizabethan play, “The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe,” in the courtyard of an old English Inn and everyone involved in the production — plus a number of Arts Festival participants — is staying there.

   The one incongruous character in the entire milieu is the new manager of the Inn, who spends his brief hour upon the page butting into others’ affairs with unwelcome advice and/or ferreting out their secrets for psychological blackmail. I somehow managed to keep my jaw from dropping in astonishment when he turned up murdered in his room after the first performance.

   I don’t know, but it somehow seemed to me that Barnard couldn’t seem to hit his stride in either of these efforts. The characters are serviceable but hardly memorable, and neither story has any great originality, except for a slight twist at the end of Door, unrelated, alas, to the plot.