2020 historical mystery; first in Baker's Anna Fairweather series
(1920s amateur detection). Anna is a maid in the country house of
Colonel and Mrs Montford; when the Colonel drops dead during his 70th
birthday party, she's one of the few people who thinks it might be
murder…
Yes, it's another American writing England, but it's better than
many; apart from the body being placed in a "casket" and the will
being read at the "courthouse" this mostly works. More to the point,
though Anna's own position is a bit unclear (she's somewhere between a
parlourmaid and a lady's maid, but she can get drafted by the cook at
no notice), this is a version of the country house that seems not
wildly out of keeping with the historical version.
The thing that particularly impressed me was Anna's attitude. Many
modern writers write modern characters in costume: servants are
constantly regretting how hard the work is and wishing things were
different. Not so Anna: she knows that she has one of the better lives
available to her, she's not going to change the world, and in any case
she's too busy to think about that sort of thing.
There's also a well-judged portrayal of the precarity of the position
of a lady's-maid: she can be a confidante for her mistress, especially
when that mistress is newly widowed, but strictly on the mistress's
terms.
The mystery? Well, there's a mystery too. It pretty much goes by
elimination, and I can't help feeling Anna would be a better detective
(and a better maid) if she weren't prone to get distracted by
something she's just observed and then freeze up or drop things to the
point that people wonder what she's doing. I at least felt that there
were rather too many candidates in play, and rather too little coda;
but this is deliberately set up as the introduction to an ongoing
series.