Pat Mosel

Jerusha's Tricks Pat Mosel

At her third attempt, Jerusha Burnett wants to become the perfect wife. Instead, she finds herself trying to become the perfect widow. Whilst engaged in this, she plays an elaborate trick on her two gay house guests - James and Oswald - and ends up disturbing the dust on a death. The scene is set in the Scottish Borders (in an imaginary village near Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott). It revolves around Kirkfield House, which Jerusha inherited from her late husband, Hamish Burnett. The action revolves around the magnetic Jerusha (born Mary Louise Patterson), not much over forty-years-old, blonde, vivacious, curvaceous and generous. It is April Fools' Day 2010 and Jerusha buries a dressmaker's dummy in the veggie garden, knowing that James and Ossie are drunkenly watching from an upstairs' window. As events would have it, the police are present when, later, the trick is exposed, the dummy exhumed. But . . . in the course of unearthing a 'body' - with permanent rigor mortis - the police find the skeleton of Hamish's first wife, Françoise Burnett. What is the fourteen-year-old secret of her death? If she didn't just go missing all those years ago, was it murder, and who was responsible? We will find out . . .