Death on the High C's

By Robert Barnard

Opera singers are often described as being larger than life, and certainly this is true of Gaylene Ffrench. Her appetites—for men, for food, for attention—are gargantuan, and her ability to irritate is similarly outsized. So when someone electrocutes the bombastic Australian contralto, few tears are shed at the Northern Opera company (though it’s a pity her understudy’s so lousy).

In fact, most of the company members are dancing a jig, and it falls on Superintendent Nichols to determine which of them might have helped Gaylene along to her just reward. The black tenor tired of being the butt of Gaylene’s bigotry? The soprano weary of jealous whispers in her ears? Gaylene’s many bedroom conquests, all anxious to avoid a repeat performance? With so many potential suspects, Nichols has his hands full, but Barnard and his readers have a deliciously malicious good time.

‘The wryest wit and most scathing satire’ Chicago Sun-Times

‘One of the deftest stylist in the field . . . goes about it with a quietly malicious sense of humor’ New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781447239505

Robert Barnard

Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain's distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. 

Reviews for Death on the High C's

[matke-261098 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked this book considerably better when I read it in 2007. eleven years later I found it fairly mean-spirited and the solution weak.A second-class opera company has been seriously disrupted by the addition of a mezzo soprano who is a vulgar, sex-mad, self-centered shrew of a woman. She is murdered and the search for the killer is on.This is an early entry from Robert Bernard, and it shows. The characters aren’t well-developed, the humor is scattershot and the plot is far-fetched and dated.Even so, there are a few signs that Bernard was an author to watch.