Arrow Pointing Nowhere

Take one grand house, stuff it with staff, and make it home to several generations. If they send their sons to Oxford and occasionally knock each other off, you've got a country-house murder mystery, the delight of classic English crime fiction. But if the boys are instead at Yale, odds are that you're reading its American counterpart, the New York mansion mystery; a genre largely invented and perfected by Elizabeth Daly. Daly does take Henry Gamadge, her gentleman-sleuth, on the occasional jaunt to the country, but in Arrow Pointing Nowhere they're both back on the Upper East Side, where Gamadge has been receiving missives suggesting that all is not right at the elegant Fenway mansion. He will ultimately, of course, unravel the mystery, but even more delightful than the solution is the peek at what the New York Times called New York at its most charming.