4.5★s
“I spent a moment considering telling the truth. The actual truth, the sheer unslippery relief of it…. No. I couldn’t tell the truth. Not without a lot of extra lying.”

Death At The Belvedere is the fourth book in the Cass Tuplin murder mystery series by Australian science and travel writer, chartered accountant, marine biologist and author, Sue Williams. When her sister Helen turns up asking for her help, Cass takes quite some convincing, but eventually the prospect of $5000 to help youngest son Brad with a lawyer for his court case does the trick.

Helen’s boyfriend(?) is dead after falling from his balcony at the Belvedere, and there’s something of hers in his apartment that she needs back. But Helen was caught on CCTV leaving the apartment on the night Ben died, so she can’t be seen there. Cass heads to Melbourne, elderly Ernie Jefferson and his many talents in tow.

They come prepared: “two pale blue boilersuits, a purple feather duster, and – at Ernie’s insistence – a retractable ski pole and a tiny jar of Vegemite” and are ultimately successful in their mission, until another intruder enters. And from there, things go badly awry, and include being the victim of a Batman-masked bag-snatcher.

Over the following weeks, Cass variously finds herself, in between routine days at the Rusty Bore Takeaway, posing as a penitent motorist in Paradise, a potential investor at a research lab, and a scientist in an office; some of it she carries off with aplomb, a mistress of bluff, but more often she’s less than convincing.

Cass is approached by a certain bulbous-nosed Vespa rider, and learns that things seem to centre around researching novel drugs obtained from platypus milk; might professional jealousies be a motive? Things get serious when a young woman goes missing.

Before it’s all sorted out and Cass eventually comes clean, there are car chases, industrial espionage, blackmail, a (possibly valuable, first edition) copy of a classic novel, and many times she has cause to wonder why she believes anything at all of what her cyber-paranoid older sister, highly accomplished at outsourcing blame, tells her.

Cass has two handbags stolen, ditto two mobile phones, her house and car are ransacked. She is surprised and impressed at the perceptiveness and utter brass of her pregnant prospective daughter-in-law, Madison, and worried, as always, about the state of her eldest son’s heart. Her own love life takes a disappointing turn.

It’s a tale that has a quirky cast; that sometimes borders on slapstick; in which weapons wielded include a bathroom plunger, a screwdriver and a sawn-off star picket; a rollercoaster ride with twists and red herrings that culminates in a dramatic climax on the Melbourne Star, a scene in which a sex toy plays an integral part.

Readers of the series will know by now that Cass has a wild imagination that leads her to concoct crazy cover stories and jump to (often erroneous) conclusions on a bare minimum of facts, causing embarrassment and irritation to one son and engendering concern for her welfare in both. Once again, very entertaining.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Text Publishing.