A Zebra Mystery Puzzler #6 - The Final Lie

Just as Marjorie Grove's second jaunt into the world of Zebra Mystery Puzzlers was better than her first, so is Marcia Blair's (or should I more accurately say Marc Baker's?) second mystery better than her first!  Perhaps as these authors start to get a better feel for their characters, they are able to focus more on crafting a well-written murder mystery and spend less time trying to give readers all the back-story on the protagonists.  Whatever the reason, it definitely gives me high hopes as this series moves upward and onward, that the stories will just keep getting better and better.  Now, if only the publisher had used the same artist as in the first Blair mystery...

 

The Final Lie returns us to the world of nurse Tory Baxter, and in similar format to the first of her tales, the reader is treated to the murder from the get-go.  No waiting around to see who is going to be murdered and how; no, in these Tory Baxter mysteries, the author gives us the murder pretty much from the first couple of pages, and Tory (and the reader!) has the entire book to sniff out the clues and make sense of everything we see in order to figure out who committed the crime and why!  And as this series progresses, I'm starting to get better at picking out the clues from the cover and the internal illustrations - either that, or the artists are making the clues more obvious.  In either event, it is rewarding to be able to notice something that plays an important part in figuring out exactly what is going on, because this mystery needed it (although, in all honesty, I picked out the killer pretty early on - not necessarily from any particular clues, but more because of the unassuming way this character was being presented in the story).

In this mystery, Tory must figure out whether her best friend's cousin, who died as a result of a hit-and-run, was killed by accident, or was it premeditated murder?  Her good friend, Kate Jeffers, who is also a nurse, is faced with the fact that her cousin, Ann Lassen, was run down coming out of a drug store and left for dead.  The police have no clues, and Kate is convinced that a mysterious man that Ann was dating is somehow at the root of it all.  When Tory and Kate uncover a large sum of money that was pulled out of Ann's bank account, as well as a strange love letter, they realize that Ann was murdered.  Now, if Tory could only get her friend on the force, Lt. Jay Thorpe, to agree.  Once again, Tory finds herself searching for clues, uncovering secrets, and putting herself in harm's way to get to the bottom of it all.

Blair (Baker) provides some great misdirects in the story, and also provides a number of good suspects.  There's Mr. Ross from the hospital's business office, who shows up at Kate's apartment just after Tory gets an anonymous call to go there.  There's also the nervous man with the dog who seems ever-so-anxious to get in touch with Kate and ultimately reaches out to Tory instead.  There's the mystery man that Ann was dating, who is believed to have been ready to marry Ann, yet he fails to appear at her funeral and no one can figure out who he is.  And there are a few other individuals who could potentially be considered suspects, if one only know which clues are important and which are nothing but red herrings.

I do love the relationship Tory has with her Aunt Tildy, who is the author of the Max Good mystery series. The two have a natural banter that is lighthearted at times, yet share some very serious conspiratorial moments.  And the relationship between Tory and Jay that they both insist is only friendship is clearly something much more than that - they are both just too blind to see it!  Oh, and it was fun to see Aunt Tildy's cook, Mrs. Jameson, play a very important part in the story!  (Speaking of which, this book was published in the late 1970s, so I have to wonder - how many middle-class, single women had the money to afford cooks back then?  Or was Aunt Tildy much more well-off than just middle class - the book is never really clear on that point...)

The artist for the internal illustrations of this book seems to be the same artist who provided the internals for the two Marjorie J. Grove books (books 1 and 5 thus far).  While they are not bad by any means, the drawings are done in very light pencil, and sometimes the details are hard to make out.  With no signature on any of the drawings, it's impossible to know who the artist is.  The cover art, however, does have a signature in the bottom right corner, just below he red car - unfortunately, it is very small, and even when enlarged, it is difficult to tell who it is - but with a little digging, I discovered the cover artist is actually Bruce Emmett.  And as it turns out, Emmett also provided cover art for the second Wanderer edition of Nancy Drew #68, The Elusive Heiress.  And speaking of the Stratemeyer Syndicate series books, this mystery has a cute reference when Tory makes a dinner date with resident Dr. Sandy Brockman, and they both mention they are still in their hospital scrubs, to which Dr. Brockman remarks, "We'll look like the Bobbsey Twins" (p. 33).

The fact that these mysteries are getting better and better as the series progresses definitely has me looking forward to reading the future Zebra Mystery Puzzlers!

RATING:  9 shards of headlight glass out of 10 for a crafty little murder mystery that has exactly the right clues to lead you down the path to the murderer!