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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2003, 320 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2004, 320 pages
Another pitch-perfect mystery in a series that never disappoints, always surprises, and keeps the laughs -- and corpses -- rolling right along.
Libby, a former flame of Hitchcock Sewell, has returned to town with her two children, but minus one husband and one nanny. Libby's husband has been accounted for -- she left him back in Annapolis. However, the nanny, Sophie, is truly missing.
As soon as Hitch starts to nose around, Sophie turns up -- literally -- in the Severn River. She's quite dead, and just a little bit pregnant. The police suspect suicide, but Sophie's mom is adamant it's murder. Hitch's sense? He sides with the mother. Racing around town, Hitch finds more questions than answers.
Murder in the Hearse Degree is another pitch-perfect mystery in a series that never disappoints, always surprises, and keeps the laughs -- and corpses -- rolling right along.
"No cheap gimmicks, nothing ostentatious, just class all the way." --New York Times
Chapter One
Ray Ghost sidled up to me in the middle of a funeral to tell me that an old flame of mine had left her husband down in Annapolis and was back in Baltimore. He had an insanely huge grin on his Howdy Doody face when he told me the news, the kind of look a dog'll give you when he's dying for you to throw the stick.
"You're at a funeral," I reminded him. "You might want to hide your teeth."
"Huh?"
"That's better."
Ray drives the panel truck for the Church Home and Hospital Thrift Shop, picking up old furniture and clothes and books and whatever various knickknacks people want to unload in exchange for a little tax write-off. It's where Ray gets most of his clothes. The man is a sartorial miasma. Today he was sporting a chocolate-brown suit that rode on his lanky frame like a pair of pajamas. Either the sleeves of the suit coat were too short or the sleeves of his yellow dress shirt were too long; the cuffs came out over Ray's hands like bells. Ray planted his...
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