Budapest

Cassandra Reilly, the translator-sleuth, first appeared in a story in the British anthology Reader, I Murdered Him. "Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair" was a joke, but Cassandra soon took on a life of her own in Gaudi Afternoon, a comic thriller set in Barcelona. Trouble in Transylvania (Hungary and Romania) and The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (Venice) soon followed, along with the collection The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman.



TROUBLE IN TRANSYLVANIA
Published under the name Barbara Wilson
Seal Press, 1993
ISBN-10: 1878067494
ISBN-13: 978-1878078067494

Cassandra heads off to Budapest to visit her friend Jack while en route to China. In a complicated turn of events, the two soon find themselves in a spa town in the Transylvanian Mountains, attempting (sporadically) to solve the mystery of the death of Dr. Pustulescu, inventor of an anti-aging formula. In a wide-ranging plot that encompasses everything from Romanian orphans and their American parents to Cassandra's own spa treatments in search of how Dr. Pustulescu met his end in the electric bath, Cassandra and a large cast of characters bring new life to Dracula country.

From Library Journal:
Ostensibly a publisher's translator, Cassandra Reilly labors only to travel. The middle-aged, London-based lesbian, presently on her way to China by way of Budapest, encounters a vibrant, seventyish woman and her nubile granddaughter on the train. Irrepressible Gladys Bentwhistle, soon accused of murdering an ancient health spa owner in Transylvania, begs waggish Cassandra (a speaker of Romanian?) for help. Cassandra, her friend Jacqueline ("Jack"), and the potential conquest Eva then enter the fray. This amateur has a mind like a steel trap, a literate, uplifting voice, and a wicked sense of humor. Great fun.