Tue 20 Oct 2020
A Mystery Review by Ray O’Leary: KATHERINE HALL PAGE – The Body in the Vestibule.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
KATHERINE HALL PAGE – The Body in the Vestibule. Faith Fairchild #4. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992. Avon, paperback, 1993.
Faith Fairchild, her husband Tom and their three-year-old son are in Lyon, France, while Tom researches his dissertation on the Albigensian heresy. A friend of his has secured them lodging across from the St. Nizier’s Church, where a clochard (homeless man) begs. Two weeks into their stay, Faith discovers the clochard’s body in a dustbin at the foot of the stairs (they live five flights up), but when she gets her husband and returns with the Police, the body is gone.
The next day, the clochard has apparently returned to his spot, but Faith realizes he is not the same man. Then a young prostitute whom Faith has befriended “commits suicide.” After being warned not to meddle in the clochard’s disappearance, naturally Faith does meddle and ends up getting abducted herself.
Early on, mention is made of a burglary ring , and one expects this will tie in with the killings. Some surprises at the end and a few likeable characters make this a tolerable effort.
October 20th, 2020 at 11:03 am
I read a few of the early books in this series when they first came out but then gradually drifted away. My impression at the time was that this was the 1990s version of the Lockridges’ Mr and Mrs North books, without the underlying bubbly humor.
I think Ray’s summation thought “a tolerable effort” is quite apt.
I had no idea that there are now 25 books in the series, with the most recent being THE BODY IN THE WAKE, which came out last year. It’s nice to see one of the earliest cozy series still going strong.
October 20th, 2020 at 9:10 pm
Are these all set in France? If so I might have to look up a few just because of the setting and a nostalgia for the husband and wife sleuthing teams of old.
I can tolerate cozies as long as I’m not smothered in quilts, cats, or dogs.
October 20th, 2020 at 9:40 pm
Well, how about cooking? I’d forgotten the details when I wrote that first comment, but here’s some details about Faith Fairchild: “She had always enjoyed cooking and had been running a catering business called Have Faith in New York, when she had met and married Thomas Fairchild, ‘a New Englander born and bred, and, to make matters worse, a minister.’ […] Tom and she now live in the (fictitious) small sleepy Massachusetts town of Aleford, where…”
It looks like France is a total anomaly. Most of her other cases seen to take place in or around New England.
The quotes above came from
https://www.detecs.org/fairchild.html