McCloy, Helen - Dance of Death / Design for Dying (1938)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

Not only a début novel but a debutante one as well, for the plot concerns the murder of Kitty Jocelyn, struck down with malaria at her coming-out party and found dead in a snow-drift the next morning, poisoned with a reducing medicine. The plot is quite mystifying: everybody loses by the death; the poison could not have been administered; and drugs, espionage, liaisons dangereuses and parapraxis abound. By the time the mystery is solved, it seems that anybody — and everybody — could have done it. Fortunately, Dr. Willing, psychiatric advisor to the D.A.’s office, is able to solve it by unusual and fascinating psychological clues, and reveal a motive as relevant in these days of anorexia and publicity as it was then.

See also http://at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.com/2011/06/danse-macabre.html