The Luck Runs Out

Charlotte MacLeod

Nov 2012 · The Peter Shandy Mysteries Book 2 · Open Road Media

About this eBook

At Balaclava Agricultural College, a kidnapping and pig-napping are followed by murder Newlyweds Peter and Helen Shandy are picking out flatware when a pair of gun-toting hooligans bursts into the silversmith’s shop, emptying the safe and leaving with Helen as their hostage. Although the police recover Helen quickly, her professor husband is badly shaken by the ordeal. Early the next morning, the college’s head of animal husbandry frantically reports another hostage situation in progress. Belinda, the school’s beloved sow, has been kidnapped, and only Peter can bring home the bacon.   There’s a possible witness to the pig-napping in Miss Flackley, the farrier, but before she can point Peter toward the vanished porker, she’s found dead in the barn’s mash feeder. By the time Peter discovers the link between the two heists, pigs may really fly.

Ratings and reviews

Another well written edition to the Shandy lineup. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Once again, it was a funny and erudite cozy mystery. I kind of forgot how good these books were. I really love President Thorkjeld Svenson, he makes the books as much as Peter and Helen Shandy do. I did think the whole plot to smuggle the precious metals out of the county was a little too clever and overly complicated, but it was still an extremely entertaining read. Though rather short by today's standards, it also had a much wider ranging vocabulary than most of today's fare.

Unusual writing style. Funny. Give it a couple of chapters. It grows on you.

About the author

Charlotte MacLeod (1922–2005) was an international bestselling author of cozy mysteries. Born in Canada, she moved to Boston as a child and lived in New England most of her life. After graduating from college, she made a career in advertising, writing copy for the Stop & Shop Supermarket Company before moving on to Boston firm N. H. Miller & Co., where she rose to the rank of vice president. In her spare time, MacLeod wrote short stories, and in 1964 published her first novel, a children’s book called Mystery of the White Knight.   In Rest You Merry (1978), MacLeod introduced Professor Peter Shandy, a horticulturist and amateur sleuth whose adventures she would chronicle for two decades. The Family Vault (1979) marked the first appearance of her other best-known characters: the husband and wife sleuthing team Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn, whom she followed until her last novel, The Balloon Man, in 1998.