The Luck Runs Out

by Charlotte MacLeod

In the second Professor Peter Shandy mystery, Shandy is in trouble up to the eyeballs again. With the Annual Competition of the Balaclava County Draft Horse Association coming up, some saboteur has reversed all the horseshoes nailed to the stable doors of Balaclava Agricultural Col lege as good-luck charms. Shandy predicts dire happenings. His predictions are nowhere near dire enough. Old friend and colleague Timothy Ames totters on the brink of another disastrous marriage. As Shandy's wife Helen (née Marsh) plans a quiet little dinner party, she is taken hostage at gunpoint while Peter is forced to help steal a vanload of gold and silver that ought to be easily tracked down but isn't. After the party, one of their guests is found murdered in a pigpen from which Belinda of Balaclava, the college's prize sow, has been abducted. President Thorkjeld Svenson's fire-brand daughter, Birgit, may hold the key to the mystery, but Birgit won't talk. With only twenty-six sunflower seeds and a jar