An accident? Not likely. In fact, suspicion has already fallen on his luscious widow, a cunning beauty fifty years his junior, set to inherit a sizeable fortune, and rumored to be carrying on with a strapping young tutor comfortably ensconced in the family estate. But criminologist Charles Hayward is casting his own doubts on the innocence of the entire Leonides brood. He knows them intimately. And he's certain that in a crooked house such as Three Gables, no one's on the level...

    The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick's mannerism's, appearance, and every significant detail of Patrick's early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that jeopardize the imposter's plan and his life.

    The story tells why some were spared and some were not... The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious, first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors, each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away, but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years, and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth.Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.

    Her interest was aroused when Toe Sargeant told her about the bitter rivalry that existed between the girls' newspaper, the Feminist, and the boys' paper, the Iconoclast.Solving the murder mystery would be a scoop no one could top, not even the Iconoclast's egghead editor, J. Swinton Towne.Though Laura soon becomes engrossed in her new friends, studies, football games, and dances, the mystery persistently crops up -- in her English term paper on the history of opals; during a picnic when she discovers a saddle bag with the same name engraved on it as the name found on the murderer's gun; and in an incredible "lost" letter mailed by the victim the very night of the murder!Girls of today will enjoy this fast-moving story about life at a typical modern college -- typical, that is, until Laura pieces together the jigsaw puzzle of an extraordinary crime.