Corpse de Ballet: A Nine Muses Mystery: Terpsichore (Nine Muses Mysteries) - Softcover

ELLEN PALL, a novelist whose prose has been praised as "precise, shrewd and brightly amusing" (Kirkus Reviews), with sentences that are "good enough to eat" (The New Yorker), is the author of Back East and Among the Ginzburgs; she has also written nine Regency romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. As a freelance journalist, she has written extensively on people in the arts for The New York Times and other publications. Corpse de Ballet is her first mystery. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Richard Dicker, and their son, Ben.

Terpsichore, the ancient Greek goddess of dance, must be smiling down from her home on Mt. Helicon at Pall's (Back East) splendid first entry in this cleverly themed series with its insights into the egos, jealousies, pains and passions of a Manhattan ballet company. Juliet Bodine, a successful writer of Regency novels and ex-professor of English literature at Barnard, puts aside her own deadlines to give literary advice to her longtime friend, Ruth Renswick, choreographer for the Jansch Ballet Company of New York, who is creating a new ballet based on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. A ballet fan herself, Juliet is fascinated by the personalities of the company and the process of creating a new production. When a lead dancer dies suddenly, she's convinced it was murder, but her old Harvard friend, police detective Murray Landis, concludes the death was a suicide. Case closed, but not for Juliet. From the executive director to the lowliest member of the corps, the characters come alive through Juliet's astute observations and the extremely well-crafted dialogue. Vivid settings capture summer in New York, and one can almost feel the heat and steam of the ballet studio. Both mystery fans and ardent balletomanes will be left with great expectations and eager anticipation for the next in the series.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.