Death Warmed Over

A weekend invitation to the Stuart estate promises polite company, formal dinners, and the usual discomforts of wealthy people pretending not to dislike one another.

By Saturday morning, Stefan Stuart is dead.

The body in the east bedroom appears to have been shot, stabbed, strangled, and poisoned—an impressive quantity of murder for one victim. Yet the wounds do not agree with the evidence, the face looks almost but not quite right, and no one in the house seems genuinely surprised by Stefan's death.

Alan P. Smith notices these things.

A quiet observer with a talent for hearing what people avoid saying, Alan begins examining the estate, its guests, and the elaborate performance surrounding the corpse. Stefan's wife, Stephanie, is composed but relieved. Richard is an actor whose grief arrives suspiciously well rehearsed. Max is sweating over a financial arrangement he insists is insignificant. Sidney watches the investigation with a discipline equal to Alan's own. Hawkins, the increasingly fortified butler, offers testimony in which time behaves more like a suggestion than a fact.

Then there is County Coroner Robert Anderson, whose determination to follow proper procedure is matched only by his uncertainty about which form proper procedure requires.

As hidden rooms, private files, planted weapons, inconsistent timelines, and carefully selected invitations come to light, Alan realizes the weekend was designed long before anyone discovered the body. Every guest has a motive. Every guest has something Stefan could expose. And someone has arranged the entire house like a stage for a final confrontation.

But before Alan can identify the murderer, he must answer a more troublesome question:

Who, exactly, is the dead man upstairs?

Death Warmed Over is a comedic country-house mystery filled with dry wit, eccentric suspects, theatrical clues, unreliable testimony, and a murder so thoroughly overdone that solving it may require determining whether it happened at all.