DIRGE FOR A DORSET DRUID

Back in England after The Cape Cod Conundrum (1993), Sir Toby Glendower, a victim of his own tediously detailed academic success, is invited by his old student Stephen Farwell, curator of the Dorset County Museum, to act as consultant on the excavation of a henge newly discovered in downtown Dorset. When the body of dotty Col. Orchard, who'd opposed the excavation, turns up in Druid garb in a nearby pond, Toby starts to make frantic phone calls to his irascible sidekick Dame Penny Spring in New Zealand. By the time she arrives, however, the all-stops-out plotting has moved from Druids (the head of a local coven has already been murdered) to smugglers to Marie Antoinette's crown jewels. The mixture as before: churlish detectives, awed and sycophantic minor characters, mystery-mongering from the dark side of the moon. For loyalists only, and you have to wonder about them.