Lord Peter And Harriet: Part II: Gaudy Night / Busman's Honeymoon()

Dorothy L. Sayers

You’ll be charmed by Lord Peter Wimsey’s wit, erudition and humanity, and forcibly struck by Sayers’ intellectual clarity, not to mention her ingenuity—she was the very first to use an empty syringe as a means of murder. In Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the “Gaudy”—but the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters—including one that says, “Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup.” Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare in the place she once felt most safe, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to aid her powers of detection—and of course, those of Lord Peter Wimsey.

Murder is hardly the best way for Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, to start their honeymoon! Busman’s Honeymoon begins when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found quite nastily dead in the cellar. And what Lord Peter had hoped would be a very private and romantic stay in the country soon turns into a most baffling case, what with the misspelled “notise” to the milkman and the intriguing condition of the dead man—not a spot of blood on his smashed skull…and not a pence less than six hundred pounds in his pocket.

With each story, Peter and Harriet become more complex and compelling, and as fascinating as the cases they’re investigating!