Death of an Old Sinner

A Grand Master of crime fiction, Dorothy Salisbury Davis introduces the redoubtable crime-solving Scottish housekeeper Mrs. Norris in this thrilling tale of family secrets and murder
General Ransom Jarvis is writing his memoirs about a distinguished career that spanned five continents and three wars. Along the way, he stumbles upon a scandal about a philandering ancestor--America’s ambassador to England who went on to become president of the United States. But a very clear and present danger embroils the irascible retired general in a deepening quagmire of deceit, fraud, and murder.
Enter Mrs. Norris, the housekeeper who has been almost a mother to Ransom’s son since he was a boy. Jimmie is currently running for governor of New York and enjoying his budding relationship with sculptor Helene Joyce. A sudden death changes everything, plunging Jimmie and Mrs. Norris into a bizarre case headed up by Jasper Tully, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. With more lives at stake, the trio follows lead after lead into a web of crime that only the canny housekeeper can clean up in the nick of time.
Death of an Old Sinner is the first novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s Mrs. Norris Mysteries, which also include A Gentleman Called, a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award; Old Sinners Never Die; and ＂Mrs. Norris Observes,＂ a short story in the collection Tales for a Stormy Night.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Mysteries and the Julie Hayes Mysteries; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.