1989 mystery; Holt's first novel. Sheila Malory is a widow in a Devon
town, who gets involved in all the local Good Works. Naturally that
ends up including poking about in a local murder. US vt Mrs Malory
Investigates.
The setup is fiddly. Sheila's old friend Charles, a high-powered
business type living in the USA, is planning to marry Lee, who runs
the local estate agency. Everyone else thinks she's ghastly, but what
can you do? But then Lee goes missing, and Sheila is the one to find
the body…
Holt was 61 when this novel came out, and shows some of the usual
signs of an author writing a modern day that they don't fully live in:
Lee may be brash and abrasive, but she's also viewed with suspicion by
everyone just because she's a businesswoman, with a strong
undercurrent of suggestion that women shouldn't really do that sort of
thing. If I't had to guess at a date of authorship, I'd have placed
this in the 1960s or 1970s.
But that's fine; I read books that were published then too, and it's
easy enough to calibrate one's expectations. And it's worth it; for
all the book is quite short and some of the characters get less
development than I'd like, there's no padding here. Sheila remembers
the young god (County, of course) who made her début Hunt Ball an
astounding success by claiming her for a dance; and we meet him now,
as life has had its way with him. There are more and more damning
revelations about Lee, to the extent that by the end one is entirely
in sympathy with all those villagers who simply assumed she was a
predator and Charles her latest victim. (We barely meet Charles, and
we never see the couple together, so the question of what he saw in
her has to remain open.)
Holt is particularly effective at juggling the amateur sleuth's
involvement with the police: Sheila is given confidences which she
doesn't break, but they in turn suggest places for her to look that
the police won't have thought of, and she can hand over that
information readily enough (while being a bit cagy about why she
looked there). Sheila is an enthusiast for nineteenth-century novels,
and so is the main policeman, who is thoroughly understanding—but
always in a way that reminds one of his position.
The ending is curt and quite old school (a criminal caught plans to
hand themselves in rather than, say, try to murder the investigator
and escape), but it all holds together, and I'll read more in this
series.