MURDER IS A MUST

The curator of a private book collection in Bath finds her outreach to the public marred by murder.

Buoyed by the success of the First Edition Society's detective-themed literary salons, Hayley Burke wants to expand the group's reach beyond its headquarters in Middlebank House, former home to the late Lady Georgiana Fowling and her extraordinary library of golden-age detective mysteries and current home to Hayley, the society's curator, and Mrs. Glynis Woolgar, its secretary. Hayley’s proposed exhibition, “Lady Georgiana Fowling: A Life in Words,” would give the public a glimpse of both the collection and the lively mind of its collector. And a letter left by Lady Fowling hints that there may be hidden in her collection a volume fit to serve as the showpiece of the exhibition: a first edition of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise signed by all the members of the Detection Club in 1933. But finding an appropriate venue and a sufficiently talented exhibition manager for the show prove daunting tasks. After several false starts, Hayley settles on Oona Atherton, whose organizational skills are matched only by her persnickety temperament. Oona is a monster of efficiency, so detail-oriented that Hayley can’t believe it’s an accident when she falls from the steep spiral staircase to her office and plunges to her death. Hayley’s struggles to keep the exhibition afloat in a sea of setbacks, with the ever present threat of a killer still on the loose, make Middlebank House the place to go for puzzles past and present.

Lively and engaging.