Her contract says no windows, laundry, or corpses, so it looks like there’s going to be an opening for a new maid. Jonathan’s Latimer’s Sinners and Shrouds, the Pan Books version of which you see above with art from Samuel Peffer, is a find-the-real-killer novel in which the main character, ace reporter Sam Clay, wakes up in bed with a murdered blonde and needs to figure out how that happened before the police nab him. He’s blacked out the entire previous night thanks to some serious imbibing and, though he has few clues, eventually learns that the murder has to do with an enormous sum of money and has roots in the past. In the hands of many authors this would be a standard tale, but Latimer is an upper tier craftsman, and everything from the dialogue to the unusual mystery at the center of the book are a cut above. We won’t say it approaches his best—it was his second-to-last novel—but it’s still Latimer and that means it’s worth a read.
the wall. I kicked over a table with two lamps on it. I tore some of the fabric off a davenport. I threw a chair at a big oil painting over the fireplace. I took a metal stand lamp and bent it up like a pretzel. I pulled up the oriental rug and ripped it down the middle.
