Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

January 4, 1993
The whole is less than the sum of its parts in this disappointing collection of nine tales, four featuring series heroine Jemima Shore (a TV investigative reporter seen most recently in The Cavalier Case ) and five with various first-person narrators. The title story takes stylish Jemima to a Caribbean island to interview the last member of an old plantation family, a sweet and eccentric old lady who turns up dead. In ``Getting to Know You,'' Jemima has equally bad luck when she tries to interview a female ex-con and is met instead by an unstable man determined to become acquainted with her--intimately. In ``The Moon Was to Blame,'' two English couples on vacation in Greece are dismayed by scruffy beach bums and an unfortunate accident. Fraser tends to kill time in her longer stories; the dawdling pace serves to dispel rather than increase tension. Her repetition of plot elements also takes its toll: on its own, the last story, ``The Twist'' would be a first-rate tale; but it holds no suspense for readers of the previous stories, whose plots turn on the same narrative device.