To Die For - Softcover

Janet Neel won the John Creasy Award for the British CrimeWriter's Association for her first novel, Death's Bright Angel, and subsequently has been short-listed twice for their Gold Dagger Award.

She lives in North London with her husband and their three children. She has had a varied career, working as a lawyer, a war games designer, a restaurateur, and an administrator in Britain's Department of Trade and Industry. She is now a Governor of the BBC, and a non-executive director of a bank, when not writing award-winning crime novels.

Old friends Judith Delves and Selina Marsh-Hayden are managing partners in a pair of successful London restaurants. Other shareholders are Selinas husband Richard, his friend Michael Owens, now engaged to Judith, and head chef Tony Gallagher. All five had agreed to sell the business to Brian Rubin, head of Gemini Group. But now Selina has changed her minda fact that looms large when shes found, strangled, in an unused freezer in the larger restaurant, along with a bunch of letters indicating several ongoing extramarital affairs. The case falls to Detective Chief Superintendent John McLeish, whose wife Francesca is an old friend of Judiths. A short time later, a grease fire in the same restaurants kitchen temporarily shuts down the whole operation. Judith, some of the staff, a crew of carpenters, painters, and decorators are hard at work trying to re-open as quickly as possible when Tony Gallagher, on an amorous mission of his own, is knocked unconscious in the empty restaurant, and, soon after, another of the principals dies of a drug overdose. It looks like suicide (due to insufferable guilt?). But theres more to come before the means and motive behind all are revealed. Neel (A Timely Death, 19xx) writes with considerable skill and verve and with intriguing asides into the world of grand opera. All thats needed for the readers fullest enjoyment is a short course in the art of the deal. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.