MURDER BY ACCIDENT

Ellie Quicke’s latest adventure explores the limits of friendship and family loyalty.

When her good friend Rose McNally moved in temporarily with Ellie’s widowed Aunt Drusilla, the temporary arrangement solved so many problems—offering Rose’s demanding daughter Joyce a beautiful setting for her upcoming nuptials, giving down-on-her-luck Rose a better place to stay than her dreary council flat with its noisy neighbors, and providing Aunt Drusilla a caregiver willing to humor her most cantankerous whims—that now the two seem on the verge of making the arrangement permanent. That is, until a hot-wired TV antenna leaves a corpse in the master bedroom and police tape barring Ellie (Murder of Innocence, p. 1102, etc.) from the gracious and valuable Victorian that she, not Aunt Drusilla, actually owns. Ellie’s selfish daughter Diana is livid; expecting to inherit, she’d thrown over her boring, faithful husband Stewart for real-estate mogul Derek Jolley. And as Ellie struggles to console her cousin and admirer Roy Bartrick, and negotiate with her lawyer Bill Weatherspoon, who’ll supply an alternate venue for Joyce’s wedding only on condition that Ellie turn down Roy’s invitation to the Golf Club Dance in favor of his own, she also must mediate between Diana and Stewart as the police focus their investigation increasingly on her daughter.

Ellie’s return to the world of romance livens this well-clued whodunit.