MURDEROUS MAYHEM AT HONEYCHURCH HALL

Plucky blonde Kat Stanford once again finds herself mixed up in the antics, antiques, and sudden deaths of the local gentry and village (A Killer Ball at Honeychurch Hall, 2016) in this featherweight treat.

Kat and her mother, Iris, have moved to the Devon village of Little Dipperton to live out their pastoral fantasies: Kat’s opening an antiques shop, while Iris writes romance novels. The local aristocracy is playing out their centuries-old history of feuding as a lark, with the Carews of Carew Court and the Honeychurches of Honeychurch Hall facing off in a re-enactment of the local skirmishes of the English civil war. The plans for this historical entertainment are briefly sobered by the discovery of a centuries-old murder victim, a skeleton in a scold’s bridle with a dagger in her ribs. Meanwhile, the newly widowed postmistress, Muriel Jarvis, has suspiciously large-scale money problems, Lady Honeychurch worries that the Earl is playing lad about town, patriarch Aubrey Carew has married a much younger woman of questionable background, and a newcomer upsets the village by opening a rival tea shop. For no particular reason, Iris insists on typewriting her manuscripts and sending them off to her editor without so much as a photocopy, so of course her latest draft goes missing. The postmistress may be to blame—she knows all the village secrets—but the search is stalled by a murder. Kat and Iris’ madcap investigation brings everything to a happy conclusion.

An overstuffed cream puff of a farce, with secret identities, family heirlooms, and ghosts oozing from every corner.