A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Marcia Muller

   

RICHARD FORREST – A Child’s Garden of Death. Lyon & Bea Wentworth #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1975. Pocket, paperback, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1982.

   Take one children’s-book writer who is also a hot-airballooning enthusiast; add his fictional creations, the Wobblies, and his politician wife, plus his best friend from Korean War days, now police chief in their small Connecticut town. These staple ingredients of Richard Forrest’s series about Lyon Wentworth add up to an intriguing mix-even before the element of murder enters.

   In this first entry in the series — whose titles are variations on well-known children’s books — Lyon is called in by buddy Rocco Herbert to help solve an unusual type of killing: a thirty-year-old murder of a man, woman, and child whose bodies are uncovered by a bulldozer at a construction site. Rocco often relies on his friend’s “unusual kind of mind,” but this case is particularly painful to the writer. His own daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver some years ago, and he and his wife have yet to come to terms with their loss.

   Lyon’s investigation — which he frequently discusses with his imaginary friends, the Wobblies — takes him back to World War II and into a reconstruction of the life of a Jewish family who fled Hitler’s Germany only to find horrors in the new world. And the resolution of the case brings a measure of peace to the Wentworths. An excellent and sensitive novel whose serious theme is leavened by a wry good humor.

   Other titles featuring Lyon Wentworth: The Wizard of Death (1977), Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), The Death in the Willows (1979), The Death at Yew Corner (1980), and Death Under the Lilacs (1985).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

NOTE: The series has continued on to include the following titles:

7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)