Mystery & Crime, Fiction Subjects

Amendment of Life

Name: Amendment of Life
Author: Catherine Aird
ISBN: 9780750519724

by Catherine Aird

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Overview

For decades, Catherine Aird's crime novels featuring C.D. Sloan have been beloved by fans and lauded by critics for their adroit plotting, playful wit, and literate charm. With Amendment of Life, Aird delivers the lively and engrossing novel that readers have come to rely upon.

Detective Chief Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Calleshire CID is used to the occasional oddity in his relatively quiet part of the English countryside. But lately things have taken a strange turn. First, in the center of a yew maze that is the showpiece of the Tudor-era house, Aumerle Court, a body is spotted by Miss Daphne Pedlinge, the elderly chatelaine of the Court. By the time the groundskeeper actually makes it to the center, he, too, spies the body, and it is indeed dead.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, a slaughtered rabbit is left on the Bishop's doorstep in nearby Calleford, an omen as portentous as the body in the maze. Now Inspector Sloan, with the somewhat trying personage of Constable Crosby in tow, must uncover what precisely is going on as they launch an investigation with more twists and turns than the maze itself.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Last seen in Little Knell (2001), DI C.D. Sloan, "head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of `F' Division of the County of Calleshire Constabulary," looks into the murder of a woman found at the center of a Tudor-period maze. Catherine Aird's breezy Amendment of Life provides an intricate puzzle worthy of the always entertaining Inspector Sloan.

Library Journal

Like Kathryn Swinbrooke (see C.L. Grace's A Maze of Murders, reviewed above), Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan investigates a body found at the center of a Tudor-era maze. Series fans, especially, will appreciate this excellent procedural addition. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The latest in the long line of stories featuring Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan and his rarely helpful underling Detective Constable Crosby, of Calleshire’s County CID (Little Knell, 2001, etc.) is kicked off when Milly Smithers, caregiver to aged Daphne Pedlinge of Aumerle Court, calls to report a body her mistress has seen in the middle of the Aumerle maze, a feature of the estate now open to the paying public and constantly, with the help of a strategic pair of binoculars, under the watchful eye of Miss Pedlinge. The body is identified as Margaret Collins, wife of David Collins, a lighting engineer and partner in Double Felix, Ltd., which had contracted to install a sound and light show in the maze. And there’s more trouble on David Collins’s domestic front, since his only child, preschooler James, is in the hospital, having lost an eye to a reportedly inherited disease. Court overseer Jeremy Prosser is a neighbor of the Collinses and of Daphne’s great-nephew and heir, Bevis Pedlinge, and his wife Amanda. Once these puppets are set up, Sloan digs in to knock down the seemingly perfect alibi of one of them, providing a none-too-convincing lesson in modern technology and a long-sought denouement. Clumsy plotting and fussy writing make this one of prolific veteran Aird’s lesser efforts.