Encore in Death: An Eve Dallas Novel: 56

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As the crowd had gathered to watch Eliza sing, Fitzhugh had raised a final toast to his glamorous wife and fallen to the floor. It turns out even Summerset doesn’t like Spindal – he thinks she's a good actress, but years after he and his wife saw her in a play, during the Urbans (after his wife had died), he was putting together a benefit for the wounded and the lost. McNab and Peabody’s kitchen is finished and she worked on the water feature with the nanny, her father’s building she and McNab a partner’s desk, her mother’s making them a light for the dining area, and McNab’s parents are sending rocks from Scotland for the water feature, so they’ll have pieces of McNab’s and her family in their home.

As Eliza and her co-star breakout into an impromptu duet, Brant raises a toast to her and then collapses, dying seconds later of apparent poisoning. The problem, at least for this reader, with Encore in Death is that the motive for the initial murder feels like really weak sauce.She says she doesn’t know how to be without Brant, that she doesn’t "think you get another once you find the love of your life.

Peabody says if it turns out Rico looked the other way while Vera poisoned Lane’s drink, she will never be able to watch him catch the Christmas-loving heroine when she slips off the stepladder while hanging the shining star on the top of the tree, then go in for the long, slow, kiss, and she resents that. Roarke is sad to find that Novak and her husband, Malcomb Furrier, are law-abiding, tax-paying citizens.

Laugh myself silly at times and I'm impressed every single time how the author makes the simplest interactions become meaningful. Eliza is waiting for him now but Brant has minions guarding her still, so they’re not yet together; this requires more white magic on his part, which somehow involves masturbation.