1994 mystery. Sheila Malory regularly visits some of the residents at
the local nursing home, and one of them has a daughter who's rather
too keen on getting a power of attorney. Then the mother disappears…
For a great proportion of the book, the mystery is not whodunnit
but whether a murder has been committed at all (or, indeed, whether
anyone has died). Which is rather splendid, if a bold move to make at
book number 3.
It does suffer slightly, as did the first book in the series Gone
Away, from a readiness to assume that a businesswoman must be evil,
and to read her behaviour in the worst possible light well before
there is any actual evidence of anything worse than brash clumsiness
in familial relations.
However, the process of investigation, of gathering information that
doesn't mean much to the holders of it but which can be combined with
other pieces to make something more useful, is effectively drawn. One
of the traditional problems of the amateur investigator is getting in
the way of the police; but for most of this book there's no real
reason to suppose that a crime has even been committed, and certainly
nothing on which the police could reasonably act.
(There are perhaps slightly too many casually unpleasant people, which
I can see is necessary to keep the suspect pool filled but for which I
wasn't really in the mood. But that's personal taste.)