THE DEAD COME TO STAY

Josephine Jones—an autistic American editor transplanted to Yorkshire—finds her stint as a landlady getting off to a rocky start, more or less literally.

The morning after her very first lodger, real estate developer Ronan Foley, checks into Netherleigh Cottage, the building that’s become the choicest remnant of the Ardemore estate ever since a fire destroyed the principal dwelling in Jo’s inheritance (The Framed Women of Ardemore House, 2024), she gets a shocking piece of news from the Abington police: Her inaugural guest has been found bashed to death. DCI James MacAdams’ inquiries into Foley’s background produce frustratingly little information. Jo’s friend Tula Byrne, innkeeper of the much more desirable Red Lion, reports that Ronan never tried to make a reservation there. Stanley Burnhope, Ronan’s employer in Gallowgate, maintains that he didn’t know the man well at all, and Stanley’s wife, classical musician Ava Burnhope, insists that she’s never heard of him despite repeated calls Ronan placed to their home from a burner phone. Ava and Sophie Wagner, Stanley’s partner in Fresh Start, an agency that settles refugees from abroad, can talk of nothing but their charitable work. And someone evidently packed the corpse in ice for at least part of the few hours it took to find it. As Jo and her sounding board, Gwilym Morgan, who plays “neurodivergent Watson to Jo’s Sherlock,” labor to unpack the many echoes of her troubled family past in the present mystery, MacAdams puzzles over the few facts he knows, which seem logically inconsistent with each other. Somebody, he reasons, must be lying about something important. Indeed, somebody is, and it’s a whopper likely to fool readers for as long as it fools the endearing detectives.

Less original than the heroine’s striking debut, but still a superior puzzle.