Last Will and Testament

Mrs. Arliss was witty. Mrs. Arliss was delightful. But mostly, Mrs. Arliss was rich. And now, Mrs. Arliss is dead, and her friends and relations—gathered to shed a tear, knock back a post-funeral sherry, and determine what loot they have inherited—are horrified to discover that things are not exactly as they might have wished. Only two people seem to have cared more for Mrs. Arliss than for her house and her bank account and her exquisite collection of 18th-century miniatures. One is her girlish secretary, the very model of a flustered ing nue. The other is Virginia Freer, who had in many ways been a second Arliss daughter. They should be free to mourn, but Virginia has a problem. The miniatures? They're missing. And all clues point to Virginia's ex-husband, Felix, who is charming, and affectionate, and a double-dipped scoundrel.


About the Author
Ferrars, E. X.: - Morna Doris MacTaggart was born in Burma in 1907 and sent at the age of six to a prestigious boarding school in England. After an early marriage and the publication of two novels, in 1940 her life was turned upside-down when she both met Robert Brown and published Give a Corpse a Bad Name (as E.X. Ferrars), her first mystery and the first in what would become the five-book "Toby Dyke" series. She and Brown married in 1945 and in 1951 moved to the US, though they returned to the UK only a year later, sickened by America's turn toward McCarthyism. In 1953 Ferrars helped found the Crime Writers' Association. The couple lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, during which Ferrars wrote more than 35 crime novels, finally returning to series mystery--first with the "Virginia and Alex Freer" books and then with "Andrew Basnett"--in the late 1970s, after a move to Oxfordshire. She died in 1995, having published more than 75 novels and numerous short stories, nearly all of them involving dead bodies.