A Deed of Dreadful Note

This dark-hued "cozy" murder mystery ushers into the world of the amateur sleuth Sidney Hirsch, a fiftysomething, long-haired, long-bearded, aristocratic Sherlock who, in this opening appearance, comes complete with a formidable if circumstantial female Watson: his sharp-witted M.A. candidate daughter, Margaret Anne. On their way to a vacation destination together, Hirsch, on a whim, makes a detour to a small seaside town in southern New Jersey where they soon find themselves enmeshed in a grotesque case of murder. The execution-style killing has all the earmarks of a professional hit, and using that as his springboard, Hirsch proceeds to solve the bizarre if apparently clueless murder until he's seemingly dead-ended by an inconsistency he can't resolve that threatens to consign his entire chain of inductive reasoning to the proverbial toilet. If a cats 'n quilts cozy murder mystery is what you were looking for, you're looking for it in the wrong place.