With this fact nugget, Benedict has created a
story in which Sayers not only goes to France with her husband to learn more
about the missing nurse case, but she also bonds with four other British crime
writers to see if they can solve the crime and elevate their status with their
male counterparts. These writers-turned-sleuths included Agatha Christie, Ngaio
Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy, the Queens of Crime along
with Sayers.
May Daniels and fellow nurse Celia McCarthy were to return to England on
a 5:30 p.m. ferry. While May went to the cloakroom to tidy up, Celia waited and
waited for May to return but May had disappeared, never to be seen again until
her body was found in a bush in a park in Boulogne months later. The Queens quickly
identified the first part of the disappearance as a locked room mystery, and
from there, Sayers found a way to duplicate May’s disappearance in plain sight.
Other parts of the puzzle included determining why the ground underneath
the body was soaked in blood when the cause of death was determined to be
strangulation and/or a drug overdose. More sleuthing by the Queens turned up a
locker key and a letter penned by May. Working together, they may just solve
the entire case, but getting the police to take their investigation seriously presented
another problem.
Things turn ugly for Sayers when she is physically attacked by an
assailant. After recovering from that, she receives a threat to expose a secret
that she has concealed for years if she does not drop the search for May’s
killer. Sayers and the Queens must work fast to confront suspects in May’s
killing while keeping the writer’s private life just that: private.
Marie Benedict has made her writing career by sharing the hidden stories about strong women in history including Mitza Maric the physicist wife of Albert Einstein, mystery writer Agatha Christie, movie star Hedy Lamarr, and Clementine Hozier, the wife of Winston Churchill. Benedict lives with her family in Pittsburgh.
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