EVANS TO BETSY

Another return to Llanfair and affable Constable Evan Evans (Evan Can Wait, 2001, etc.). The North Wales village has a visitor from the US: Emmy Church, staying in the room at Mrs. Williams’s house just vacated by Evan while she does research for her Ph.D. thesis on psychic ability. Emmy’s focus appears to be the Sacred Grove, a few miles from Llanfair—a New Age center recently established on the estate inherited by Lady Annabel Bland-Tyghe, newly married to her third husband, well-known American psychic Randy Wunderlich. Lady Annabel’s son Michael works there too. Convinced by Emmy that she has psychic powers, Betsy Edwards, barmaid at Llanfair’s Red Dragon pub, has joined the domestic staff at Sacred Grove. Evan, meanwhile, is trying to trace Rebecca Reisen, an American girl missing for two months whose parents are in Llanfair seeking help. After Betsy’s dream, in which she sees Wunderlich dead in a cave on the grounds of Sacred Grove, proves all too prophetic, a postmortem uncovers a lethal dose of drugs in the victim’s body. Evan, following a lead involving yet another missing girl, this one vanished from Oxford, returns to Sacred Grove just in time to prevent further carnage and find the answers to some crucial questions.

Too much plot and not enough Evan in this readable but overambitious outing.