Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea

January 30, 2006
Atherton delivers another cheerful cuppa cozy, her 11th to feature U.S. ex-pat Lori Shepherd (after 2005's Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin), who lives with her attorney husband, Bill Willis, and their cricket-playing twin sons, Will and Rob, in the Cotswolds. When Bill begins receiving e-mail death threats from a stalker who signs his revenge-obsessed dispatches "Abaddon" (from the Book of Revelations), Lori, the twins and Reginald (Lori's pink rabbit toy) retreat to the scenic Scottish isle of Erinskil, where they stay as the guests of one of Bill's clients, jovial Sir Percy Pelham, at Dundrillin Castle. The ideal refuge, however, soon becomes a hotbed for intrigue, and Lori's forced to depend more on her own instincts than the advice of the ghostly Aunt Dimity, who communicates through journal entries, to protect her sons' lives as well as her own.