The Shortest Day: Murder at the Revels

✍ Scribed by Langton, Jane

• Book ID: 109117391
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 438 KB
• Series: Homer Kelly 11
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0140173773

✦ Synopsis

**Homer investigates the violent deaths of a beautiful stage manager�s admirers

**

Each year, the beautiful Sarah Bailey marks the winter solstice by organizing a pageant of drama and song for the citizens of Harvard University. Last year, the star of the show was Henry Shady, an Appalachian folk singer whose homespun charm won the eye of every young woman in Cambridge. On the eve of this year�s Revels, the singer is struck down in the street by an SUV driven by Sarah�s husband. The police dismiss it as a freak accident, but Mary Kelly, who witnessed the singer�s death, is not so sure.

Her husband, Harvard professor and sometime sleuth Homer, dismisses her suspicion. But when more of the revelers suffer untimely deaths, Homer sees a pattern. Winter has gripped Cambridge, �and Sarah�s husband may have been seized with murderous jealousy.

Review

�[An] enormously appealing . . . colorful and absorbing tale.� �*Publishers Weekly*

�A cheering mystery . . . a way to get through the longest night of the year.� �*The New York Times Book Review *

�Langton�s description of the stick-wielding Morris dancers is so vivid that readers can almost hear the sticks clashing.� �*Boston Sunday Herald*

About the Author

Winner of the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award, Jane Langton (b. 1922) is an acclaimed author of mystery novels and children�s literature. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Langton took degrees in astronomy and art history before she began writing novels, and has set much of her fiction in the tight-knit world of New England academia.

She published her first novel, *The Majesty of Grace*, in 1961, and a year later began one of the young adult series that would make her famous: the Hall Family Chronicles. In *The Diamond in the Window* (1962) she introduced Edward and Eleanor, two New England children whose home holds magical secrets. Two years later, in *The Transcendental Murder*, Langton created Homer Kelly, a Harvard University professor who solves murders in his spare time. These two series have produced over two dozen books, most recently *The Dragon Tree* (2008), the eighth Hall Family novel. Langton continues to live, write, and illustrate in Massachusetts.