Lee Martin: Bird in a Cage (USA 1996)

From the Publisher:
DEATH FROM ABOVE...

Wearing yellow-dyed ostrich feathers, the trapeze artist performed inside a gilded cage high above the dinner-theater crowd. Fort Worth detective Deb Ralston and her husband, Harry, enjoy the show -- until the cables snap, and acrobat, trapeze and cage plummet forty feet, killing the perfomer and two patrons.

The victim, Julia Gluck, is a member of a famous European circus family. Beautiful and beloved, there is no apparent motive for her murder. But the severed cables prove someone wanted her dead.

Deb finds the answers buried in a decades-old tragedy, and she searches for a bold and elever killer exacting long-awaited -- and deadly -- revenge.

"A breathless, high-flying climax caps this lively tale..." -- Publishers Weekly
"...the easy style and unhackneyed background make it one of Martin's better efforts." -- Kirkus Reviews

Lee Martin: Bird in a Cage. A Deb Ralston Mystery. Worldwide Library, ISBN: 0373262256 (December, 1996), 250 p., $4.99.

Lee Martin: Bird in a Cage (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
To celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Harry and Deb Ralston go out to dinner at the Bird Cage, a restaurant in downtown Fort Worth. Its fancy dinners are complemented by a floor show featuring a young woman on a flying trapeze, reminding Deb nostalgically of the three-ring circus she and her family visited when she was a girl.

The romance of the evening is ruined, however, when the performer plummets to her death - an "accident" caused by deliberate cuts in the ropes suspending her in midair forty feet above the tables. Once again, Deb Ralston - Detective Deb Ralston - must put her personal life on hold because duty calls.

Well, sort of on hold: Another murder only means this working mother must juggle taking care of the baby, the teenager, and the pit bull (not to mention the husband and the recently divorced partner, who confesses he's developed a crush on Deb) with her increasingly time-consuming and dangerous job.

Lee Martin brings us another winning puzzler, this time set in the high-pressure world of traveling performance artists, close-knit circus families -- and, of course, plain, old-fashioned murder. Bird in a Cage promises to be the latest entry in the long line of successful Deb Ralston mysteries that prompted Booklist to call Deb "a believable sleuth in a superior series."

Lee Martin: Bird in a Cage. A Mystery. St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0312130287 (August, 1995), 227 p., $19.95.