A Vow of Fidelity - Hardcover

Black, Veronica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312140649 ISBN 13: 9780312140649

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

Synopsis

Twenty years after promising to meet her art school classmates at Queen Elizabeth's tomb, Sister Joan receives a mysterious photograph of the meeting place and learns that three of her former companions have suffered terrible deaths

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Sister Joan, of the tiny Order of the Daughters of Compassion in Cornwall, faces the most personal of her forays into crime- solving (A Vow of Devotion, 1995, etc.). A photograph received in the mail, with no sender noted, of her first-year art class, reminds Sister Joan that the group of ten had promised to reunite in 20 years, at Westminster Abbey--the date just a few days hence. Permission granted, she heads for London to meet the others: quiet Dodie Mason, married to engineer Colin, mother of two; bubbly Fiona, still a beauty, still unattached; Barbara Ford, then a nonentity, now an elegant career woman recently returned from New Zealand; buxom Serena, two divorces later, still living on Daddy's fortune. Two men have turned up also--handsome Derek Smith, whose wife Sally died three years before in a fall, and Paul Vance, who seems to have turned from straight to gay over the years. Missing is Bryan Grimes, killed in a hit and run, and Serge Roskoff, dead of a drug overdose--his pathetic young girlfriend later found dead, her throat slit. A lot of mortality for a small group of youngish people, Sister Joan muses as she awaits the group for a week's retreat at the convent. But that's not the half of it, Sister Joan will discover, as falsehoods are uncovered, domestic lives laid bare, old crimes revealed and new ones committed. The lean narrative and vivid sense of menace are undermined, in the end, by some clunky plot and contrivances of character, but it's an intriguing puzzle a good part of the way. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Sister Joan of the Order of the Daughters of Compassion, seen before in Vow of Devotion, begins a somewhat far-fetched, seventh murder investigation outside the walls of her convent on the Cornish moors. Joan sets off for London and the 20th-year reunion with her art college classmates, hoping to promote the convent as a place for a quiet retreat and reflective seclusion?the institution's latest money-making endeavor. At Westminster Abbey, their prearranged meeting place, Joan learns that, within the last two years, two members of the class have died under suspicious circumstances; then she learns that a third was an apparent suicide only weeks before. As the surviving friends take advantage of the convent's retreat program, Joan begins to investigate and finds that one of her old classmates might be a murderer. Many of the familiar characters, including the usually fresh-witted Joan, have appeared in better light in earlier tales. Stretching credibility beyond its limits, this latest Sister Joan adventure is slack and disappointing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0312140649
• ISBN 13: 9780312140649
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 174