Authorpreneur Dashboard – John Spencer Yantiss
Murder By Bequest
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
On a frigid Friday afternoon in February, Eleanor Harkness shows up at the door of the “granite palace,” Sherrod Colsne’s New York townhouse. Her unexpected yet incredibly timely appearance not only knocks Colsne’s normally unflappable assistant, Monty Weston, off stride, but takes both of them down a winding path of romance, past and present, and decades-old, bitter hatred. Though only four days actually elapse in the telling, Murder by Bequest is a story spanning over twenty-five years, three continents, and two primary cultures, and surrounding America’s foremost family of wealth, and social and political position. Bertrand Wellman Harkness, IV, director of the Harkness Foundation, and statesman in three presidential administrations, not quite two weeks before the “blizzard of 2006,” is brutally murdered, and grotesquely, sexually mutilated after the fact. What follows is another murder, and another attempted, seemingly the inexorable assault of a bête noire. Only Colsne’s genius is able to run the culprit to ground. In the end, however, even his prodigious powers cannot save Eleanor, who is also killed, with the villain revealed as the lady who practically everyone took to be her mother, but who in fact is her step-mother. Deep-seated and long-nursed hurt, resentment, and malice, from that emotionally dark woman, and another quite distant quarter, produce the terrible killing spree, bringing almost total dissolution to the Bertrand Wellman Harkness, IV family.
Book Bubbles from Murder By Bequest
Monty discovers his need to protect Colsne
Sherrod Colsne and Monty have a de facto father, son relationship that transcends the commonplace model. Willfulness and sarcasm are shared traits, and both are wont to overlook the bonds of respect and affection which, rather amazingly, developed quite swiftly and deeply after the two first collaborated in the Claudia Sicco affair. In this passage Monty fully realises that Colsne is far more than an employer, a respected fellow detective, a close friend, or even a "father figure," as is popular to say, regarding a mentor or other person whose knowledge and experience command respect. In this swift passage of events Montague Boyd Weston finds that he would be willing to interpose himself between Colsne and anyone who wished to do him harm.
Action, Cerebral and Visceral
Murder by Bequest, as all Sherrod Colsne Mysteries, combines deductive genius with spurts of incredibly lethal action, often romance and humour, and always the grotesque nature of human deviance. In this one fragment we see Monty Weston’s reaction to finding, what he at first assumes is the younger sister of the woman with whom he has fallen deeply in love. A not too stringent analysis of the wording will reveal the birth of a desperate fear for his lady’s own life.
Who is Sherrod Reynard Colsne?
Years ago one of Rex Stout's fellow authors, many of whom were members of "The Baker Street Irregulars," an association of Holmes enthusiasts, postulated that Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes, by Irene Adler. Wolfe, telling Archie Goodwin about his "starving to death," following the Spanish Civil War, talks of making his way to America via France and England. Did he engage in a liaison with a French woman? If so, what happened to the issue, and what took place in England? Much room for conjecture. As Holmes was fond of telling Watson, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
