Gaudy Night: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery with Harriet Vane [Paperback]

“Gaudy Nightstands out even among Miss Sayers’s novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.” —Times Literary Supplement

The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, praising her “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail.” The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane,Gaudy Nightfeatures an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master.Gaudy Nighttakes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet’s alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.

When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters, including one that says, Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup. Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.

“Gaudy Nightstands out even among Miss Sayers’s novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.”“[Sayers] brought to the detective novel originality, intelligence, energy and wit.”“One of the greatest mystery story writers of this century.”“So excitingly good in its field, so brilliantly plal³.