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Daisy
has been ill with bronchitis and needs to get away to breathe
in some clean air. So she stays in a hotel in Beaconsfield
and catches up with an old school friend who lives nearby.
Wilhelmina Willie” Chandler shares a house with two other
superfluous women, the term for any of the 2 millionextra”
women who were unable to find a husband after the First World
War killed off so many men. Daisy and Alec are invited to
lunch with the trio but are all dismayed to find a dead body
in the locked cellar Alec has just managed to open. This is
a body that has lain there too long for it to be identifiable.
Who is it, and who put it there?
I have read all the books in this series and find them consistently
entertaining, historically accurate and well plotted. Ms Dunn
has created some likeable characters to spend time with and
I enjoy the mixture of police procedural and amateur detection
as Alec and Daisy both work to solve the crime. As usual this
one was replete with red herrings as the body could not be
identified, so anybody could have done the crime. Watching
the suspects being narrowed down and other mysteries coming
to light and being solved made for compulsive reading. As
with all good series it is enjoyable to both meet up with
old characters and see them in new situations and encounter
new ones. Ms. Dunn paints an accurate picture (as far as I
know) of what it must have been like to be a “superfluous
woman” in the 1920s and how other people regarded them,
as well as showing how police work was done back them as opposed
to now. Anybody new to the series needs to know that to be
properly enjoyed they need to be read in order; in short this
might have a mostly standalone plot but it does not have standalone
characters engaged in it. It is books like this that remind
me why I enjoy reading historical whodunits so much; one series
that shows no sign of running out of steam.
Reviews of other titles in this series
Death
at Wentwater Court, 1
The
Winter Garden Mystery, 2
Requiem
For A Mezzo, 3
Murder
on the Flying Scotsman, 4
Damsel
in Distress, 5
Dead
In The Water, 6
Styx
and Stones, 7
Rattle His Bones, 8 [review
1] [review
2]
To
Davy Jones Below, 9
The
Case of the Murdered Muckraker, 10
Mistletoe
and Murder, 11
Die
Laughing, 12
A
Mourning Wedding, 13
Fall
of a Philanderer, 14
Gunpowder
Plot, 15
The
Black Ship, 17
Sheer
Folly, 18
Anthem
For Doomed Youth, 19
Gone
West, 20
Heirs
of the Body, 21
Superfluous
Women, 22
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