BONJOUR, MISS SEETON
by Hamilton Crane
If you've ever wondered why the Channel tunnel didn't open 20 years ago, you can thank everyone's favorite retired art teacher/sleuth, Miss Emily Seeton (Sweet Miss Seeton, 1996, etc., etc.). Caught up in a burst of Plummergen charity spurred by an unexpected legacy of reclusive pensioner Horace Jowett, Miss Seeton still has time to accompany the village Junior Mixed Infants on a day trip to France, where she meets Sir George Colveden's old friend Count Jean-Louis de Balivernes; to help entertain the Count when he and his daughter Louise repay the visit; and to make the sketches that help Scotland Yard—already thoroughly alarmed by an unexploded wartime bomb the tunnel drilling crew has run up against—identify first a murder victim and then her killer. This time, though, Miss Seeton is hampered by a pallid mystery and a culprit who'll fool only readers dazed by the thick overlay of village gossip.