FATALITY WITH FORSTER

“I’m counting on this being a corpse-free honeymoon,” Lt. Sheriff Luke Richards tells his bride, the former Emily Cavanaugh. As if.

The happy couple have distanced themselves from Oregon, the scene of their earlier mildly criminal adventures. They’ve booked a month’s stay in England at Fitzhugh Manor, near Binsey, a village within shouting distance of Oxford. In fact, they’re the very first paying guests to enjoy the hospitality of Sir James Fitzhugh and his American wife, Allison. Of course there are ripples in the pond. James’ grandmother, Lady Margaret Fitzhugh, is in such denial about her grandson’s decision to turn the manor into a guesthouse that Allison asks Emily and Luke to introduce themselves to the dragon as her friends. When Allison, who’s excited about the fact that she and James have hired her ex-fiance, architect Adam Marshall, to design a housing development they plan to build on the estate, shares the news of her pregnancy with Emily, her happiness reminds her confidante painfully of the long-ago miscarriage that ended her own dreams of bearing children. And Penelope "Bunty" Fitzhugh, the distant cousin James never married, is clearly having it on with Conan O’Donnell, her partner in the Fitzhugh Stables, even though Lady Margaret regards him as a member of a distinctly lesser species. When a horseback riding accident begins to look like murder, Emily and Luke figure that they’d better solve it posthaste in order to reestablish peace in the family.

Blink and you’ll miss the reference to E.M. Forster, which is just as well, since it gives far too much away.