DEATH TIMES SEVEN A daniel pitt novel

Barrister Daniel Pitt's seventh case, set in 1913, is regrettably the last by Perry, who died in 2023, leaving it to be completed by her friend and "personal editor" Zackheim. As usual, it opens with a bang. Learning that the parents of Toby Kitteridge, his senior colleague at fford Croft and Gibson, have been shot--his mother is dead and his father in a coma--Daniel is tasked with informing his old friend of this shocking news while he's in the middle of examining a witness at the trial of Peter Ward, who's accused of murdering Alexandra Stanton while attempting to rape her. Daniel accompanies Toby to the Suffolk village where his late mother and comatose father lived. But the week's delay Toby's judge has granted isn't enough, for over the strident objections of his sister, Alberta Walsh, who insists that invading their mother's body would be a moral outrage, Toby orders an autopsy. When Toby's wife, Dr. Miriam fford Croft, a pathologist, conducts the procedure, she makes a telltale discovery that turns out to overturn the local constabulary's presumptive verdict of murder and attempted suicide against Toby's father, Rev. Justin Kitteridge. Since Toby's not in the right place geographically or psychologically to resume his defense of Peter Ward, the job falls to the less experienced and less prepared Daniel. He bumbles the case with almost comical ineptitude before the denouement vindicates the guesses of most readers helped along by the virtual absence of alternative suspects in the murders of both Alexandra Stanton and Delia Kitteridge. Fans of the period franchise needn't worry about Perry's lurid title: Most of those deaths are set comfortably in the past, the victims never named. A vigorous defense of women's rights wrapped in a pair of unsurprising mysteries. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.