TWO NAMES FOR DEATHBarney drives a Boston cab and is surprised to pick up a fare downtown who gives his own address as her destination. Barney rents a room with the Shafft family—old Mrs. Shafft, her son Theo, and their granddaughter Edith—but has no idea that his customer is Lenore Bellane, Theo’s wife and Edith’s real mother. So when Lenore is found with two slashed wrists in her hotel room the next morning, Barney feels that something here just doesn’t make sense.The supposed-suicide doesn’t make sense to Lt. Eggart either. He suspects murder. Lenore had been seen the day before with a Mystery Man who turns out to be her brother-in-law, Francis Bellane, but what motive could he have for killing the woman who seems to have meant so much to him? Why is Barney’s boss, Mr. Bottman, getting involved? And how do the Shaffts figure into this? [She] can describe the best and worst of a character in one sentence, and can make a single gesture tell of years of accumulated pain or madness Fenwick s novels are all beautifully plotted in human intimacy. --Carol Cleveland, Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers "Simply and subtly written, with knowable characters and plausibly complex motivations, this won't disappoint those who recognized Fenwick in Murder in Haste as a possible major contender." --Anthony Boucher, NY Times a real corker of a classic mystery an immensely enjoyable detective novel, complexly yet cleanly plotted with characters that actually live (until they die, that is). For someone who later excelled at the stripped down mid-century crime novel, Fenwick here produced a densely packed true detective tale with quite credible police investigation. --Curtis Evans, The Passing Tramp TWO NAMES FOR DEATH Barney drives a Boston cab and is surprised to pick up a fare downtown who gives his own address as her destination. Barney rents a room with the Shafft family old Mrs. Shafft, her son Theo, and their granddaughter Edith but has no idea that his customer is Lenore Bellane, Theo s wife and Edith s real mother. So when Lenore is found with two slashed wrists in her hotel room the next morning, Barney feels that something here just doesn t make sense.The supposed-suicide doesn t make sense to Lt. Eggart either. He suspects murder. Lenore had been seen the day before with a Mystery Man who turns out to be her brother-in-law, Francis Bellane, but what motive could he have for killing the woman who seems to have meant so much to him? Why is Barney s boss, Mr. Bottman, getting involved? And how do the Shaffts figure into this? E. P. Fenwick was born Elizabeth Jane Phillips on April 5, 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri. After high school, she wrote poetry and an unpublished first novel which she destroyed when it was rejected by a publisher. She then enrolled in secretarial courses and became a French translator for two years. She adopted the pseudonym E. P. Fenwick in the early 1940s and resumed writing, publishing three detective mysteries with Farrar & Rinehart. After turning to mainstream writing for ten years as Elizabeth Fenwick, she returned to writing crime fiction with the suspense novel Poor Harriet. Fenwick married noted harpsichord maker, David Jacques Way, in 1950, and continued to publish more suspense novels until 1973. She died from Alzheimer s Disease on November 20, 1996.