The title Why Shoot a Butler? pinpoints in four short words, just who this book will appeal to. It is clearly a crime novel, and a mystery, but to understand the title at all, presupposes a basic familiarity with the social mores and incipient arrogance of the English gentry in a time gone by.
Every family has secrets, but the Fountains’ are turning deadly…
On a dark night, along a lonely country road, barrister Frank Amberley stops to help a young lady in distress and discovers a sports car with a corpse behind the wheel, dead from a gunshot wound. Shirley Brown protests her innocence, and Amberley believes her — at least until he gets drawn into the mystery and the clues incriminating the girl begin to add up… The new heir to Norton Manor discovered the difficulty of keeping decent help when the butler got murdered on his night off. But why would anyone shoot a trusted old family retainer?
The bumbling police are well-meaning but completely baffled. Fortunately, barrister turned amateur sleuth Frank Amberley, is as brilliant as he is arrogant. He has a couple of suspects in mind, the nervy young lady discovered at the scene of the crime and the snooping gentleman in the halls of Greythorne, when suddenly there’s a second body. In this dramatic tale of upstairs, downstairs and family secrets, Amberley, although he wants to discover the desperate killer, this time he’s not sure he wants to know the truth…
