Escapade

An English country house week-end party in 1921, as reported by the prolific letter-writer Miss Jane Turner to her friend Evangeline…Well, perhaps not typical, not when the guests include a Bolshevik aristocrat, an over-sexed debutante, a phoney medium there to host the obligatory séance, a very suspicious Viennese psychiatrist, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the world-famous escapologist, Harry Houdini. When the week-end’s unscheduled entertainment also includes the murder – in a locked room – of the wheelchair bound head of the family, the Earl of Axminster, it’s just as well that the wise-cracking Phil Beaumont of the famous Pinkerton detective agency is on hand to bring order to the chaos, enthusiastically if not efficiently aided by Miss Turner and Harry Houdini – surely the best person possible to deal with a locked-room mystery.
Escapade was the first volume in the trilogy to feature ‘The Pinkerton Pair’ – the handsome American Beaumont and the deliciously innocent English rose Jane Turner – as they solved crime across Europe in the early 1920’s. Along with Masquerade and Cavalcade, the trilogy is published by Ostara in the UK for the first time.
When first published in the USA in 1995, the Los Angeles Times called ‘A classy and classic whodunnit…A seemingly effortless, beguiling style and a mesmerizing story smartly told.’