The Face on the Wall

✍ Scribed by Langton, Jane

• Book ID: 109117444
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 396 KB
• Series: Homer Kelly 13
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

**While trying to start a new life, Homer�s niece uncovers a murder

**

Life has not always been fair to Annie Swann. A bad marriage sullied her youth, but since her divorce she has made enough money illustrating children�s books to add a wing to her house. The new addition�s focal point will be a thirty-five-foot blank wall, where Annie plans an elaborate mural of the fairy tale characters who pay her bills. But as she paints, mysterious markings appear on the mural: first splotches, then a woman�s face, ringed with blond hair and covered in blood.

It seems to point to the disappearance of Pearl Small, a Harvard student who took classes from Annie�s aunt Mary. As Mary and her husband, professor and ex-cop Homer Kelly, look for Pearl, Annie continues painting, unaware that with each brushstroke, she marks her wall with another layer of evil.

Amazon.com Review

Jane Langton's pen-and-ink illustrations, which decorate the pages of her books about retired Massachusetts detective Homer Kelly and his historian wife Mary, are as apparently simple--and deliciously deceptive--as her words. Even if your mystery tastes run to the tough and hard, you'll have trouble avoiding the warmth, sharp wit, and clever detection that animate this series. "Homer Kelly had been Mary's husband for a long time," begins a typical Langton paragraph. "He was a big man with a coarse gray beard and a rough head of hair like the thick fur of a dog. His impulsive enthusiasms had often led him into absurdities in the past, but half a lifetime with a sensible wife had mellowed him a little. So had his experience with violent criminals." It's art that gets Homer and Mary involved in their 13th adventure, when an 8-year-old boy with Down syndrome is found murdered near a wall that Mary's niece has been illustrating with characters from fairy tales. The missing, abused wife of a nasty property developer is also part of the mystery, which the Kellys unravel in a suspenseful and thoroughly plausible manner. Other Kelly outings available in paperback include *The Dante Game*, *Dark Nantucket Noon*, *Dead as a Dodo*, *Divine Inspiration*, *Emily Dickinson Is Dead*, *God in Concord*, *Good and Dead*, *The Memorial Hall Murder*, and *Murder at the Gardner*. *--Dick Adler*

From Publishers Weekly

Langton's impish sense of humor enlivens this latest in her deftly illustrated Homer Kelly series (Dead as a Dodo, 1996), which is further enriched by modern parallels to ancient folk tales. Homer, a retired Massachusetts detective, and his sensible and sharp-witted wife, Mary, a historian, have full schedules: Homer aids young prisoners with legal problems, and Mary teaches fifth-graders at an exclusive private school. Yet there's always time to delve into local mysteries. In this case, the questions center around the missing and much-abused wife of a greedy land developer and the tragic death of Eddy, an eight-year-old Downs Syndrome child who was found, his skull crushed, at the base of a wall that Mary's niece Annie was illustrating with fairy-tale characters. Echoes of folk tales and nursery rhymes permeate every phase of the investigation: there are strong hints of Bluebeard, Hansel and Gretel, the Fisherman's Wife?even the Odyssey. Shrewd and persistent sleuthing in a tightly controlled plot and a group of feisty and eccentric colleagues combine to keep suspense high and lead to a conclusion that features a wonderfully loathsome 10-year-old?surely one of the most odious children created since The Bad Seed.
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