Jessica Manifest's questionable death spirits Inspector Luke Thanet away from his daughter's wedding preparations to investigate the victim's supposedly accidental death, and as he delves into her secretive past, he realizes that there are many people with motives for murdering her Talk about a killer deadline! Inspector Luke Thanet, the hero of Dorothy Simpson's series of mysteries set in England, has a murder and a wedding on his hands in Once Too Often . The wedding is his daughter's, and her future life partner has Thanet not a little worried; it comes almost as a relief, then, when the case of a possibly murdered newspaper reporter distracts him from more personal concerns. The victim, Jessica Dander, was found lying at the foot of her stairs with a broken neck. Though it looks like an accident, given the dead woman's unfortunately long list of enemies, murder cannot be counted out. As Thanet and his partner quietly go about the business of solving Dander's death, readers are treated to a well-written, carefully plotted story and characters whose portraits are richly detailed. Inspector Luke Thanet's latest case involves the suspicious death of a newspaper reporter in the English village of Sturrenden. Suspects include the woman's unemployed battered husband, her estate-agent lover, the lover's angry wife, a reported neighborhood prowler, and others. Thanet's investigation proceeds with satisfying depth as he and Sergeant Lineham debate details of the case, theories about the murderer, and all the permutations thereof, but both suffer personal strain as well. As usual, Simpson (A Day for Dying, LJ 5/1/96) tailors her plot with skill and care, nicely dovetailing all the clues and reserving a special twist for the end. Strongly recommended. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Filled with misgivings about his daughter's upcoming wedding to a much wealthier (but less obviously committed) fianc, Inspector Luke Thanet can only pray that Bridget's marriage doesn't turn out like Jessica Dander's. That longtime Kent Messenger reporter's unhappy union has come to a suitably abrupt end with her fall down the household staircase. Or was she helped into her final flight--by her dispirited, laid-off husband Desmond Manifest; by her brother-in-law Bernard Covin; by her lover, estate agent Adam Ogilvy; or by the unknown figure she felt convinced was stalking her? Despite the bottom of those stairs becoming the place for what turns out to be a surreptitious parade of interlopers as numerous as the crowd of innocents in any Agatha Christie library, reliable Thanet and his sidekick, Sgt. Mike Lineham, close this modest case by uncovering a 20-year-old secret. In his 14th (A Day for Dying, 1996, etc.), Thanet, as usual, deftly unpeels the layers of unhappy deception shrouding the victim, though the result this time is a surprisingly long-winded anticlimax. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. With the exception of Thanet, a thoughtful man with a rich emotional history, the characters are well observed without being especially complex.... They function flawlessly, however, dropping each piece of evidence into place and pushing the story to its artful ending. -- The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio