Amanda Cross: The Question of Max (UK 2018)

From the Publisher:
Amanda Cross probes into the shadowy past of Cecily Hutchings and her Bloomsbury-like literary circle in The Question of Max, a gripping whodunit from start to end.

Once again, Kate Fansler tries to take a break from her full time career as a literature professor and amateur sleuth. She finds refuge in a rural retreat - the last place she thought her friend Max would come to visit.

When he asks to be driven to the home of a recently deceased family friend Kate can't resist the opportunity to learn more about of one of her literary heroes, Cecily Hutchins. But what starts as a light-hearted trip to the coast of Maine, ends with Kate discovering a body on the rocky shore. A body of one of her students.

Kate takes it upon herself to find out what really happened. Can her own presence at the scene just be a coincidence? And how much can she really trust Max?

Follow amateur sleuth Kate Fansler in this gripping murder mystery series, continuing with No Word From Winifred and A Trap for Fools.

Amanda Cross: The Question of Max. Pan Macmillan / Bello, ISBN: 9781509820115 (March, 2018), 174 p., £10.99, eBook £3.99.

Amanda Cross: The Question of Max (USA 1984)

From the Publisher:
"NO ONE HAS A SHARPER EYE THAN AMANDA CROSS!" -- Washington Post Book World
When Max -- well-bred, utterly snobbish Max asks Kate Fanser to accompany him (to drive him, yet) to the rocky coast of Maine, where the famous author Cecily Hutchins lived until her recent death, Kate reluctantly agrees. Max is literary executor and wants to have a look at Cecily's papers.

But first, a little walk to the ocean. Kate, more courageous than her companion, climbs down the rocks and, to her horror, discovers the drowned body of one of her students.

The question of how it ended up in this barren place leads amateur sleuth Kate to several intriguing questions about Cecily Hutchins and her Bloomsbury-like literary circle and finally to the question of Max. He is too elegant for words. But is he too elegant for murder?

The answer makes for a delicious mystery starring a most charming, well-educated, and determined professor/detective

Amanda Cross: The Question of Max. A Kate Fansler Mystery. Ballantine Books, ISBN: 0345313852 (May, 1984), 219 p., $2.50.

Amanda Cross: The Question of Max (USA 1976)

From the Publisher:
In a book sparkling with the wit, suspense, insenuity, and literary erudition that brought popular and critical success to In the Last Analysis, The James Joyce Murder, Poetic Justice, and The Theban Mysteries, Amanda Cross weaves a subtle new entertainment that confirms her as master of "the American intellectual crime novel at its brightest and best" (Francis Iles)

We rejoin her heroine, the splendid Kate Fansler, full-time Professor of English and part-time amateur sleuth (imagine Harriet Vane played by Hepburn) in a moment of defantly rural retreat -- from New York and from her major university. But suddenly her wilderness is invaded by the most improbable of intruders: her colleague, the formidably polished and patrician Max Reston. Max is not a man given to excursions into other people's lives, and his natural habitat is the salon rather than The Simple and The Rustic. So why Max? What can have upset him sufficiently to make him brave nature in the raw? The crux of the riddle turns out to be the tangled estate of a famous English novelist, a woman Kate has greatly admired. Max is the executor, and he needs help. But the "literary remains" contain some more-than-academic problems, whose solution Kate alone can find...

As the track leads her from New York and Maine to England (not only present-day Oxford, but the strange, magical Oxford of the end of World War I, meeting ground of the young men and women who were to become the brilliant iconoclastic literary generation of the 1920's) we are plunged into a wonderful mélange of crime and comedy of manners: academic intrigue, scholastic skulduggery, snobbery with violence, and highborn family scandal -- all of it cool and crisp as Kate herself while events move to an (elegant) double whammy. A glorious tribute to the genre of detective fiction perfected by Dorothy Sayers.

Amanda Cross: The Question of Max. A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN (lt. Impressum, aber falsch!): 0394483349 (August, 1976), 197 p., $6.95.