Crisis at the Cathedral

December 21, 2015
Dams’s delightful 17th Dorothy Martin mystery (after 2015’s The Gentle Art of Murder) takes the American schoolteacher and her retired policeman husband, Alan Nesbitt, to a police conference in Cambridge, England. While exploring (the fictitious) St. Stephen’s college in the historic town, Dorothy gets lost and winds up in a supposedly locked science lab, where she spots a pool of blood on the floor. When she returns with help, the floor is completely clean, and Alan questions whether Dorothy really saw anything amiss. A determined Dorothy persuades friendly local detectives to look into the matter, though it appears at first that the incident was a student prank involving a lab animal. When Dorothy’s snooping leads to a dirty scalpel that’s later proven to be covered in human blood, the plot thickens. Anglophiles will relish every aspect of St. Stephen’s and its gorgeous Cambridge surroundings. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron Agency.

February 1, 2016

While her husband attends a police conference at Cambridge University, Dorothy Martin explores a science building and discovers a pool of blood--but the blood is gone when she returns with help. A prank gone wrong? A failed experiment? The 19th entry (after The Gentle Art of Murder) continues the winning ways of this long-running series.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2015
A visit to Cambridge University is educational in more ways than one. Anglophile expat American sleuth Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, have come to Cambridge, where Alan is speaking at a police conference and Dorothy plans to enjoy the beauty and soak up the atmosphere. But Dorothy gets lost while looking for Newton Hall, site of the conference at St. Stephen's College, and stumbles into a laboratory with a pool of blood on the floor, where she gets the barest glimpse of someone in a lab coat vanishing through a door. Although there are many possible explanations, Alan doesn't take Dorothy's fears lightly and introduces her to Superintendent Elaine Barker, who understands her concerns but must tread lightly in a city where the colleges, each with its own security staff, shun that sort of publicity. Dorothy continues to sleuth, and Elaine's nephew, science student Tom Grenfell, makes some suggestions. Perhaps, after all, it's merely an undergraduate prank. An African student experimenting with rats seems to be hiding something, but it's only when Grenfell goes missing that the whole matter is taken seriously. Fortunately, Dorothy finds clues in a few of her favorite Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries, including Gaudy Night, that help lead to a solution. Cambridge science takes center stage in this latest cozy in Dams' traveling series (Days of Vengeance, 2014, etc.). It's an average mystery saved, especially for Anglophiles, by an atmospheric look at the famous university.

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December 15, 2015
Dorothy Martin, a retired schoolteacher living in England (she's married to a retired British cop), always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time. Of all the people who could have found blood on a floor in a university, it has to be Dorothy. And when she goes to find someone to take a look at the blood, it's gone by the time she returns to the room. If you're a regular reader of this always engaging series, you'll know Dorothy won't just shrug it off; she'll dig, pester, and follow the tiniest clues until she finds out why the blood was there, whose it was, and why someone would have cleaned it up. Dorothy is an immensely likable amateur sleuthalthough by now, after more than 15 books, she might as well hang out a shingle and turn proand the stories are intriguing, suspenseful enough to keep us turning pages but not so elaborate that we're tempted to give up in frustration. A new entry in this series is always welcome for fans of fictional amateur sleuths.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2018
American Dorothy Martin, a former schoolteacher living in England with her husband, Alan, a retired Scotland Yard detective, keeps finding crimes to investigate?so many that by this point (this is the twentieth entry in the series) readers might wonder why Dorothy doesn't just hang out a shingle and become a professional PI. This latest mystery is a particularly vexing one for Dorothy and Alan: a married Muslim couple, who have come from Iraq to visit the cathedral town of Sherebury, has disappeared; soon they turn up in London, where it seems they were engaged in a terrorist plot. But Dorothy wonders, Is it possible they came to England not to commit a terrorist act but rather to stop one from being committed? The terrorism-related story line gives the book a bit of extra dramatic heft, and Dams makes the most of it, showing Dorothy at her inquisitive, resourceful, determined best. Fans of the series will be pleased to see this engaging heroine once more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)