Rich, aristocratic, and at the heart of swinging London, "Pudge" Coombe-Peters has everything except a decent nickname. And in fact, he has two special attributes: He owns the narration-the drawling, deliciously snobbish, all-but-impossibly irritating narration-of Falling Star, and he has a chum named Henry Tibbett, who comes in just awfully handy when people start dying on the set of the film that Pudge is producing. Tibbett is especially welcome...

One of the oddities of Golden Age fiction was its fixation on the occult and the generally weird-ancient gypsy curses, haunted burial grounds, etc. It's therefore something of a relief to settle in with the refreshingly literal Ms. Moyes: When a title refers to a third dog, we are not talking about some metaphysical barking: There were three dogs and now one is missing. Up in arms about this is Emmy Tibbett's sister Jane, a stalwart of the animal-rights...