Overview
A simple life...a deadly interruption.
Widow Elizabeth Elliot leads a modest life. As Clerk of the local Quaker meeting, she not only handles the congregation's daily activities, but also is their moral and inspirational leader. So when murder strikes this nonviolent community, suddenly Elizabeth's life gets very complicated.
Facing certain IRS eviction for refusal to pay war taxes, pacifist Quakers Sheldon and Hope Laughton had no idea their lives were in danger. Elizabeth finds herself in a real-life nightmare when she discovers Hope murdered...lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. Shocked and horrified, Elizabeth has no time to mourn— the police think she's the killer. Suspicion swirls in Cambridge, Massachusetts— pitting Quaker against Quaker— and only Elizabeth's quiet wisdom can find the murderer.
Editorials
Kirkus Reviews
Third in a series set in Cambridge, Mass. (Quaker Witness, 1993, etc.), focusing on the sleuthing talents of widowed Elizabeth Elliot, sixtysomething Clerk of the area's Quaker congregation, called the Meeting. Hope and Sheldon Laughton, parents of six-year- old Cathy, are members, too—pacifist fanatics who withhold IRS taxes (used for purposes of war). As a result, they're due to be evicted from their handsome house, which is located next door to the home of Hope's childless sister Constance and her husband Titus. Elizabeth, making a supportive early morning call to the Laughtons on eviction day, finds Hope's body, shot to death, on her kitchen floor. As Detective Stewart Burnham bumbles his way along—first arresting, then releasing Elizabeth—she does some quiet investigating on her own, learning of the unrequited passion of Otto Zimmer (also a Quaker) for the victim, and of Sheldon Laughton's recent conversion to Catholicism, undisclosed to the Meeting. Adding to Elizabeth's anxiety are the illness of her best friend Patience and the ambivalence of her own feelings about marriage to suitor Neil Stevenson. In the end, Elizabeth acts quickly to prevent another of Burnham's follies and produces the true, surprising culprit.More tract than fiction, with long passages detailing the history, philosophy, practices, and current struggles of the Quakers. Earnest Elizabeth is accorded near-reverential treatment; the puzzle gets short shrift. A curious work, then, that will leave the patient reader better informed, if only mildly entertained.