Description Borthwick’s finest tool> `Coup de Grace’ intrigue Maine author’s latest

COUP DE GRACE, by J.S. Borthwick, St. Martin’s Minotaur, New York, 2000, 335 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Put together an amateur sleuth and a gory murder and what do you have? Another mystery by Maine author J.S. Borthwick; this one titled “Coup de Grace.”

The scene is an all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts, and the sleuth is English teacher Sarah Deane, a newly minted Ph.D. who fills in for a term at the preppie locale. The “Grace” in the title is an arrogant, dictatorial French teacher, Madame Grace Marie-Henriette Carpentier, who rules her classes with a stereotypical iron hand.

Borthwick, who lives on the Maine coast with her family, places Sarah as a Mainer with her physician husband, Alex.

This chatty little cozy has a bunch of intriguing characters, from La Grace to an eager acolyte, Babette, and two flirtatious males, one a flask-toting lecher and the other an ingratiating hustler.

Sarah arrives to find a hostile underground campaign by students intent on pelting the stern French teacher. There are nasty signs tucked away on campus, a look-alike scarecrow on the soccer field and another sign depicting her as a rattlesnake. Snowballs are a favorite ammunition used on Madame.

Most of these are put down as pranks, but the action turns ugly for real when art history teacher Anita Goshawk is found bludgeoned to death while wearing Madame’s favorite cloak.

While authorities in the form of school security officer Jake Markham, a closet artist, and local detective Hillary Mumford officially investigate the murder, Sarah probes a few ideas herself. And her husband, down from Maine for a weekend visit, gets embroiled in it by assisting with the autopsy.

What makes the Borthwick mysteries a success isn’t the plotting, although that is straightforward enough, but the characterization and description. Here is her first look at the housemother in Sarah’s building:

“Freda Cohen was a brown-eyed, brindle-haired woman of some breadth. She wore her hair braided and circling her head, and her sweater with its silver buttons and her long, woolen skirt and woolen stockings gave off whiffs of the Tirol.”

I can’t remember when I last read of a “brindle-haired” woman, but the description certainly gives the reader a good handle on the character. And it certainly catches the eye more than saying someone has “streaky gray (or tawny) hair.”

Midway in the book, we are treated to a more creative description:

“Grace was approaching slowly, struggling to bring her black umbrella under control. Her purple and black wool hat, or helmet, reminded Alex of something that might have been worn at Agincourt. And, having lost her cape, she wore a purple quilted affair that hung to her ankles, so that from the neck down, the general appearance was of an ambulatory duvet.”

An ambulatory duvet? I discovered that the author is telling us that it looked like she was moving along wrapped in a quilt or bedcover.

While the plot steadily moves along, Borthwick periodically entertains the reader with introspective asides. And although this is more cerebral than action-oriented, the author does provide us with a violent and surprising climax.