SNOBBERY WITH VIOLENCE

What’s an Edwardian lovely to do when potential swains consider her too outspoken for marriage but ripe for more salacious proposals?

Lady Rose’s papa turns to Captain Harry Cathcart, a discreet untangler of upper-class dilemmas, to protect his daughter from randy intentions, including those of the libidinous king, and the couple soon find themselves hobnobbing at Lord Hedley’s house party, where along with his man Becket and her maid Daisy, they must endure upstairs/downstairs prejudices, monocle-popping and corset-tightening, farcical bed-swapping and door-slamming, and—dash it all—the death of Mary Gore-Desmond. Though Detective Superintendent Kerridge is instructed by his betters to close the case, calling it an accidental overdose of arsenic consumed for cosmetic purposes, the captain and the lovely, of course, disagree, and soon she’s meeting with a villain in a tower overlooking the moat and he’s saving her by diving into the moat, where the body of poor Colette, maid to another double-barreled lady, Miss Bryce-Cuddlestone, has been hidden. When the horses and hounds and heroes have had their fill of hunting, and the puckish author has had her fill of satirizing idlers, all will come right, with every indication that Captain Harry, Lady Rose, and their sidekicks will meet again for more danger and romance.

Old hand Chesney (the School for Manners series and, as M.C. Beaton, the Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth mysteries) maintains her charm and sassiness while indicting evergreen pomposity and class-status stupidity.