Death in Zanzibar |
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Mary Margaret Kaye
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Pages: (Paperback)
ISBN: 0312901305
Pub: St Martins Mass Market Paper
Pub date: 1984-03
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 355136
Reader Reviews:
Atmospheric and Fun Mystery (10/10 people found this helpful)
If you like old-fashioned mystery and romance set in an exotic locale, this is a very fun read. M.M. Kaye wrote several of these atmospheric mystery romance novels which always incorporated some exotic setting she had been to as she and her husband moved all over the world. In the forward she writes that it is a Zanzibar which no longer exists, but one she saw and wanted to share before memories of it had faded into the sunset.
There is a light and entertaining feel to the overall story and a very likeable heroine in Dany Ashton. The characters are colorful and well defined and fit right in to the time period. Lash is a young man about town who slowly comes into his own helping Dany with a ruse during their trip to Zanaibar and the House of Shade, where the mystery of why her hotel room was broken into and her passport taken deepens into murder and more.
Dany is sweet and endearing as she shows old-fashioned bravado during the course of the mystery. She will emerge from her mother's shadow and come into her own just as Lash does. There is, of course, an innocent and growing romance between the two and the reader knows how this will end long before they do. Kaye makes good use of the exotic locale as we see it through the eyes of her heroine, who is also seeing it for the first time.
This is a very fun and entertaining mystery with the values and mores of a time gone by. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be to say it has much the same feel as watching one of those early 1930's mystery films set in an exotic locale; the kind you catch late at night when you can't sleep and enjoy all the more because it was a suprise.
All of Kaye's mysteries fit this bill and this one is perhaps my favorite. If you like your mystery and romance a bit on the old-fashioned side, you will enjoy this greatly, as I did. An excellent summer read.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Fiction -> General
Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English
Books -> Refinements -> Format (binding_browse-bin) -> Paperback
Books -> Refinements -> Font Size (format_browse-bin) -> Regular Size