‘Blood Lies’ by Marianne MacDonald

Published by Hodder,
20 September 2001.
ISBN: 978-0-34076895-2 (PB)

For Dido Hoare, antiquarian bookseller in North London, a rural village in Somerset sounds just the place for a little rest and recuperation from the strains of the recent past, so muses Dido as she drives with her son Ben down to Alford, at the invitation of her old friend Lizzie Waring, who telephoning out of the blue, claims she just wants to talk, so come and visit.

Three years before Lizzie had married into the Waring family, owners of the Georgian mansion Monksdanes. Whist it quickly becomes clear that the Waring family are living in straitened circumstances, darker secrets lurk in the faded but still elegant house. What does Lizzie really know about the family into which she has married.

This is the fifth Dido Hoare mystery, and it is the best to date. A true body in the library mystery, with many twists and turns that keep the reader guessing. All the ingredients of a good mystery are present, an accidental death, but is it? A missing heirloom, or is it? A sleepy picturesque village, a peeping Tom....

At a recent Mystery Women event we discussed 'Murder in the Family' and how this particular aspect of murder can be more sinister and scarier than a random serial killer murder, and how aptly Marianne MacDonald illustrates this in Blood Lies.
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Reviewer: Lizzie Hayes

Marianne Macdonald was born in the lumber town of Kenora, Northern Ontario, and grew up in Winnipeg and Montreal. Her first children's book was published when she was 16. She took her BA at McGill University, then went to Oxford for graduate studies in English. For thirty years she pretended to be an academic, acquiring various degrees and teaching at universities in Canada and England. She left teaching early in order to return to her writing.