HASTY DEATH

What are Edwardian parents to do when their headstrong daughter prefers solving murders to marrying?

Under the impression that they’re sending Lady Rose to a rest home to reconsider her spunky ways, the earl and the countess are actually committing her to a lunatic asylum run by the dastardly Dr. McWhirter. Rose escapes, of course, through the stealth of her companion, the cockney-voweled ex-showgirl Daisy, and her allies, dashing Captain Harry Cathcart and his man Becket, who have saved them once before (Snobbery with Violence, 2003). But Lady Rose’s travails continue. Her déclassé career as a “typewriter” is cut short when she’s kidnapped (Cathcart to the rescue again). What next? Determined to discover who shot the Honourable Freddy Pomfret, she finds herself at a country-house party that includes his blackmail victims Lord Alfred Curtis, Mrs. Angela Stockton, and Mrs. Jerry Trumpington. Dr. McWhirter, reappearing, is providently dispatched by Cathcart. But then Mrs. Trumpington is strangled, another marriage proposal is proffered, Lady Rose and Cathcart are at odds, and Det. Supt. Kerridge waits at the pub while Lady Rose confronts Pomfret’s nemesis and succumbs to yet a third marriage proposal.

Much absorbing description of an Edwardian lady’s undergarments and chances of marriage after her season passes. But Chesney, a.k.a. M.C. Beaton, might have paid a tad more attention to plotting and, dash it all, suspense.