British Manor Murder

August 29, 2016
Lucy Stone is looking to improve her dismal mood in Meier’s engaging 25th mystery featuring the Tinker’s Cove, Maine, journalist (after 2015’s Candy Corn Mystery), so she jumps at the chance to accompany her fashion-conscious friend, Sue Finch, to England. An old pal of Sue’s, the Earl of Wickham, has invited her to attend a hat exhibition at his ancestral home, Moreton Manor, and is happy for her to bring a friend. Lucy and Sue realize that leading the 21st-century stately life is no easy task soon after their arrival at the 120-room manor, which is plagued by dry rot and foul stenches. The earl and his sister can’t afford the costs of repair, but worse is in store. On a tour of the manor’s garden maze, Lucy and Sue discover a dead body at the feet of the classical statue at the maze’s center. Amateur sleuth Lucy can’t help regarding everyone in the house as a suspect while she sorts out the clues. Anglophiles will find plenty to like in this delightful cozy. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

July 15, 2016
Counts, countesses, and corpses highlight Lucy Stone's trip across the pond.Despondent at the departure of her beloved grandson, Patrick, for Alaska, where her son, Toby, recently found a full-time government job, Lucy (Candy Corn Murder, 2015, etc.) agrees to accompany her friend Sue Finch to Moreton Manor, where her friend Peregrine Pryce-West, Earl of Wickham, is preparing a show of historic hats. Expecting Downton Abbey, Lucy finds Moreton a lot more Downstairs than Upstairs. Perry and his sister, Poppy, live in the old servants' quarters, leaving most of the old manor house free for public tours. Perry does the cooking; Poppy handles the finances with no help from husband Gerald, who's busy frolicking in the stables with comely Vickie Pryor-Keyes. Still, Lucy's charmed by her attic room, with its Laura Ashley wallpaper and quaint vanity table. At least, until a bad smell invades Moreton: first figuratively, in the persons of snobbish Aunt Millicent and sour Harrison, who pollute Moreton's easygoing atmosphere with demands for comforts befitting their stations as Countess of Wickham and her lady's maid, and later, literally, as a mysterious odor forces Lady Wickham out of the main house. Lucy eventually traces the smell to a decomposing body. But unlike the body Lucy stumbled across earlier in the garden, presumed to have died of an overdose, her second corpse is clearly a murder victim since the room where he's discovered has been walled off on all four sides. A peek into British country life provides a nice break, offering enough local color to excuse a rather tepid puzzle.

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