The satiric detective story is rare in modern publishing, but does, occasionally, appear. However, it is more often a British than an American form. Robert Barnard's The Bad Samaritan (1997) is a good example of the genre, with its seamlessly plotted whodunit tale and yet its droll humor at the expense of small town gossips and tattletales. Therein, a pastor's wife who has lost her faith takes a seaside outing to rethink how her new mind-set changes her marital role. At her seaside hotel, she befriends a young Bosnian employee, whose wife and daughter remain in his beleaguered homeland, but when he follows her to her husband's parish, enlists her aid in his search for employment, and ends up a suspect in a murder case, she begins to see her village and her relationship to it in a new, less agreeable light. Barnard's The Corpse at Haworth...