Bill Slider, a middle-aged, straight-arrow London cop, finds his life thrown into passionate disarray by the murder of a mysterious young violinist. So far, so good, and so much like many, many other police-procedurals. So why did Orchestrated Death have a permanent home in Partners & Crime’s section devoted to “100 of the Best We’ve Ever Read”? Because the writing is so irresistibly clever and so heavily laced with the very best puns. American readers take note: Many of those puns work only with an English accent. The character, for instance, who has a cat named Oedipus? To an American, that’s not particularly amusing. But take a minute to remember that the Brits pronounce the name with a long “e” – “EE-dipus.” The cat, after all, is aptly named, because “Ee-da-puss wot lives ‘ere.”