A Dismal Thing To Do
   Alisa Craig
  1986 Doubleday & Co. Garden City NY USA
   ISBN: unknown


All Janet Rhys wanted to do was buy an antique and what she got was a lot of danger. All Madoc Rhys, a Detective Inspector in the RCMP wanted was to keep his wife safe.

I had not read an Alisa Craig book before although I note from the cover she's written a handful about this husband and wife team in the Canadian borderlands.

Janet Wadman Rhys is off hunting up an innocuous antique washstand when things go awry and she very nearly gets herself expunged. Janet's husband, a Royal Mountie Detective Inspector, has a bit of a flutter when his wife's car turns up abandoned nowhere near where she was supposed to have been.

Ms. Craig has a pleasant and humorous turn of phrase and smoothly hooks us into the hunt even as we shake our heads and wander what all the fuss is about.

And then we begin to have ideas, we get clues and pleasant invitations to a rural change of scenery, meeting robust and dour, suave and bumptious characters along the way.

This is not an earth-shaking tome. It would liven you up after a funeral; make a wait in hospital bearable; warm the cockles of your heart and certainly had me hunting up the rest of Alisa Craig's efforts: A Pint of Murder and Murder Goes Mumming et al.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca