Overture to Death
by Ngaio Marsh
It's murder in the little English village, but the two local spinsters – Miss Campanula, who was shot by a gun hidden in a grand piano, and Miss Prentice, her friend who may have been the intended victim – are not exactly the beloved little old ladies of song and story. They were (and are) waspish, gossiping snobs, passionate only about their own narrowly defined religion and, perhaps, about the local vicar. Could they have been sufficiently unpleasant to provoke a murderer? Inspector Roderick Alleyn finds it difficult to imagine this, until he's faced with the notion that the murderer was in fact provoked by Rachmaninoff's Prelude in c-sharp minor.