Professor Peter Shandy Mysteries by Charlotte MacLeod (#01~8)
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Overview: Charlotte MacLeod (1922-2005) was an internationally bestselling author of cozy mysteries. Born in Canada, she moved to Boston as a child, and lived in New England most of her life. After graduating from college, she made a career in advertising, writing copy for the Stop & Shop Supermarket Company before moving on to Boston firm N. H. Miller & Co., where she rose to the rank of vice president. In her spare time, MacLeod wrote short stories, and in 1964 published her first novel, a children’s book called Mystery of the White Knight.
Genre: Mystery
1. Rest You Merry: For years, Professor Peter Shandy has been badgered in vain by Jemima Ames, Assistant Librarian and Annual Chairperson, to decorate his campus home for the Grand Illumination which is Balaclava Agricultural College’s main fund-raising event. Now he can hold out no longer. Goaded to madness, he buries his small brick house under an avalanche of plastic reindeer, flashing lights, and fake Santa Clauses, hooks up an amplifier blaring "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth," locks the switches at "on," and escapes to sea on a tramp steamer.
Shipwrecked and conscience-stricken, he crawls back to face his irate colleagues, and finds Jemima Ames dead on his living room floor. Police and security guards say it’s an accident, but Shandy suspects a crafty murder under the mistletoe. The good professor also suspects that he had better discover the truth without further wrecking the Illumination or the next corpse will be his…
2. The Luck Runs Out: Professor Peter Shandy is in trouble up to the eyeballs again. With the Annual Competition of the Balaclava County Draft Horse Association coming up, some saboteur has reversed all the horseshoes nailed to the stable doors of Balaclava Agricultural College as good luck charms. Shandy predicts dire happenings. His predictions are nowhere near dire enough.
3. Wrack and Rune: A gruesome murder leads Professor Peter Shandy to uncover an ancient Viking curse. When 105-year-old Hilda Horsefall tells young reporter Cronkite Swope of a stone carved with Norse runes that once sat in the nearby woods, the writer starts salivating at the thought of breaking the news that Vikings once marauded through their sleepy Massachusetts countryside. But while he’s jotting down notes, a scream rings out, and Cronkite finds an even bigger story. A farmhand has been burned to death by quicklime, and Cronkite gets an exclusive scoop. In this neck of New England, strange deaths are invariably referred to Professor Peter Shandy, the only local with the know-how to connect fearsome quicklime to the Vikings of old. But as he digs into the ancient mystery, he finds the forgotten Norse gods are not above demanding a modern sacrifice.
4. Something the Cat Dragged In: For Professor Ungley, death isn’t half as inconvenient as losing his toupee. An unpleasant man in every respect, university professor Herbert Ungley is exceedingly vain. One morning, his landlady catches her cat coming in with Ungley’s hairpiece between its teeth. It’s clear something has happened to the old grouch, because he would never be caught without his toupee. Ungley is found in the yard behind his social club, with his head bashed in and his baldness plain for the world to see. Although the police are content to call it an accident, sleuthing horticulturalist Peter Shandy is unconvinced, and finds there are too many unanswered questions. How did Ungley come to have such a bulging bank account? Who was Ungley’s long-lost heir, and what did he have to do with the professor’s lost hair? And whose is the second body in the woods? Shandy must answer these questions and more if he’s to find who pulled the rug out from the balding corpse.
5. The Curse of the Giant Hogweed: Chasing a vile English plant, Professor Peter Shandy and his friends go on a most peculiar trip. The giant hogweed, a creeping menace known for crushing the life out of any plant foolish enough to get in its way, has put the hedgerows and pastures of the English countryside in jeopardy. Fishermen find their streams clogged, young lovers are caught with rashes in embarrassing places, and the English nudist colony has been all but exterminated. Only Peter Shandy, the famed horticulturalist responsible for the world’s finest rutabaga, can save the day. But when Shandy and his colleagues set out to find hogweed samples, they stumble into an unusually mystical adventure. Quite by accident, Shandy trips through a publican’s portal, and finds himself conversing with a giant. Trapped in a land of castles, wizards, and knights, Shandy must use every scrap of his horticultural genius to get back home—lest the hogweed triumph in his absence.
6. The Corpse in Oozak’s Pond: On Groundhog Day, secrets surface alongside a waterlogged corpse. The rural town of Balaclava greets Groundhog Day as an excuse for one last cold-weather fling. The students and faculty of the local agricultural college drink cocoa, throw snowballs, and, when the temperature allows, ice skate. Oozak’s Pond is not quite frozen this year, though, and as the Groundhog Day celebrations reach their peak, the students see someone bobbing through the ice. The drowning victim is long past help, though; he’s badly decomposed and dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat with a heavy rock in each pocket. First on the scene is Peter Shandy, horticulturalist and, when the college requires it, detective. But solving this nineteenth-century murder will take more than Shandy’s knack for rutabagas. Relying on his wife’s expertise in local history, the professor dives into a gilded-age mystery that cloaks secrets that remain potent enough to kill.
7. Vane Pursuit: While tracking down rare weather vanes, Helen Shandy stumbles on a case of arson. The weather vanes of the famous craftsman Praxiteles Lumpkin are one of the great cultural treasures of rural Massachusetts. Helen Shandy, librarian at Balaclava Agricultural College, is roaming the countryside, camera in hand, capturing images of these lovely copper sculptures, trying to give them the attention they deserve. But each time she takes a picture, the featured vane vanishes. Could there be a gang of breezy-minded burglars on her tail? The night after Helen photographs the vane atop the famous Lumpkin soap works, the building burns to the ground. With the help of her husband, Peter, she tries to track the thieves-turned-arsonists. But when the things take a dangerous turn, Helen doesn’t need a weather vane to see that a deadly wind is blowing.
8. An Owl Too Many: When a nocturnal hike turns deadly, Professor Peter Shandy takes an interest in owl spotting
Emory Emmerick comes to Balaclava Agricultural University as a scout for a television station. Although the faculty and students are hardly ready for prime time, Emmerick’s interest is in environmental programming—a subject that inspires even the driest Balaclava professor to wax poetic. In his search for material, Emmerick joins Peter Shandy and a few of his colleagues on the annual owl-count. And though the television producer’s loud mouth and heavy feet make him a dismal birdwatcher, none of the academics expect him to make a fatal blunder. Chasing what appears to be a badly lost snowy owl, Emmerick stumbles into a trap that yanks him into a tree. By the time the professors reach him, he’s been stabbed to death. Discovering that the snowy owl was nothing more than a handful of feathers attached to a fishing pole, Shandy concludes that Emmerick was murdered. Plenty of people might like to kill a television producer, but which would-be killer had the gall to make the helpless Nyctea scandiaca an accomplice?
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#09~10 HERE:
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