David Gillon

 A Fire at the Exhibition, T E Kinsley

Emily, Lady Hardcastle and her lady's maid/companion Flo are back, and Littleton Cotterell is having a village art exhibition, which can only mean trouble. Though at least for once there are no bodies to be found once the smoke is dispersed - just a missing priceless book (well, not priceless, but worth £1,000, in 1912). Also missing, apparently grabbed up by the thieves on their way out of the hall, are a bust and painting belonging to Emily and Flo's friends Sir Hector and Gertie. The bust is worthless, but the painting is one of a pair Sir Hector was hoping to sell, and without that money they will lose the manor in a matter of weeks. So while Emily and Flo can't really be bothered with the book (which Emily snobbishly dismisses as arriviste), there's a painting to be found, because Hector and Gertie refuse point-blank to let Lady Hardcastle pay off their debts, and a bicycle race to be survived (winning is definitely not on the menu, not even for Flo). There are a satisfying number of red-herrings, and a wandering cast of cycling club committee members, retired circus artistes and treasure hunters.

Definitely at the cozy end of the scale. 

Chooser of the Slain series, Michael Anderle.

Nine books for £0.99, so I wasn't expecting much, especially from someone with a truly ridiculous number of books to their name (if you look at https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/michael-anderle/ he appears to be releasing a book a week or better), but I'm not sleeping well and quantity has a quality all of its own. That said, these are surprisingly good.

The series starts with Valkyrie and history post-grad/business analyst Val Kearie (geddit!) being interviewed by Viking Inc, a security consulting firm / PMC, who want to steal a march on the CIA, NSA and other TLAs who are also interested in recruiting Val, given she has an interesting skillset, on top of which she's the daughter of a general, has one brother who's a Navy SEAL and another who's in Army or Air Force specops (there's a continuity glitch over which). Impressing Viking's three Jarls (aka managing partners, aka the specops colonel, the specops colonel/ hacker and the specops major/spook), Val finds herself on the company plane to Spain along with huge ex Force Recon Marine Jacob Pinkerton, where a company that advises banks on complying with money-laundering rules is under cyber-attack. Pinkerton has the cyberskills and combat skills Val lacks, she has the European knowledge he's never gained, but things escalate, and so do the stakes.

This first book plays completely straight, and it's a decent enough modern technothriller (well apart from its belief that the language the coder speaks somehow affects how computer programmes work), but it's bookended by dreams about the Allfather.

Into the Battlefield is the second in the series, and Val's heritage is starting to make itself felt, particularly when Reginheid the Valkyrie starts offering her advice from any convenient mirrored surface. It's quite an interesting setup, even if the world-building is a little shaky (Hungarian Romani families called Boswell, Smith and Young. Really? And it takes all of about a minute to look up the name of the Hungarian FBI equivalent instead of calling them "the Hungarian FBI equivalent"). With a US-authored book dealing with anti-Romani/antisemitic violence in Hungary I was quite prepared for it to get painfully gauche*, but it's actually not bad on that front and escalates into an interesting story with an unexpected source of villain (no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, not that it's the Spanish Inquisition). 

* It does make the completely fair point that racism against the Romani is by far the most acceptable form of racism in Europe.

Requiem for Heroes sees Val and Jacob stumbling through a series of seemingly un-connected rapid fire cases, until Val realises that there is a common factor, and one they've seen before. But if you gaze too long into the Abyss, sometimes the Abyss will get pissed and come after your families. And sometimes protecting your families may mean inviting the Allfather to take his best shot at you.

By Savage Harbinger Val has a target for vengeance, but they've disappeared into the high-stakes criminal underworld, until a chance facial recognition hit puts them on the hunt again, and with a maguffin of their own to find. (Warning for ridiculously overpowered computer-based maguffin with little authorial understanding of how this stuff actually works).

4 down, 5 to go.

Witch-Warrior Series, TR Cameron, Marth Carr, Michael Anderle

Another 12 for £0.99 series, only read the first of them so far. 

Witch with a Badge: Deputy Marshal Cait Keane is a spell-slinging witch with the US Marshals Service and has just been reassigned to Boston, where, without even time for the orientation tour, she finds herself working the magical murder of a federal judge with the rest of her new team - a couple of non-magical male marshals and a technomancer/hacker who I'm reading as probably neurodiverse. On top of that job she's a member of the Marshals' Special Operations Group (think FBI Hostage Rescue Team) and also spends her weekends back in Ireland, where her family lives in a magical village. I'm strongly tempted to call the village stuff twee, which is unfair, but not by much. And to add to all that she finds herself summoned for a magical rite of passage, for which the reward is a dragon all of her own. Said dragon appears to be the draconic equivalent of a teenager, and it's not clear if he's a reward, backup for an unrevealed threat, or his family taking advantage of circumstances to get him out of the house.

There's a lot going on here, but it's a readable lot.

Compulsory, Martha Wells

Murderbot is supposed to be making sure the humans don't do any on-the-job pilfering, but mostly Murderbot is watching soap-operas. Then one of the humans gets herself into a potentially fatal situation and what's a Murderbot to do?

It's short, and slight, but it is Murderbot, and only £0.77.

Winter's Gifts, Ben Aaronovitch

Despite the name, this Rivers of London novella is not a story about Winter and Sommer and the Abteilung KDA (aka Rivers of Germany), it's FBI agent Kimberly Reynolds, Peter Grant and the Folly's American contact, investigating a call for help from a retired FBI agent in a small town on the edge of Lake Superior, just as an unprecedented winter storm blows in and isolates her from any backup - even the local cops are busy with search and rescue after the town got kerb-stomped by a snow tornado (which apparently is a real thing). Things get worse when she realises her contact has disappeared, apparently abducted, and likely not by human hands, leaving her to dig into a mystery with roots two centuries old, with the help of only a sexy meteorologist, a Bureau of Indian Affairs ethnologist, and a librarian, none of whom she entirely trusts.

It's very intense, the whole thing resolving in less than 24 hours from her arrival, and very readable, Kim is a very different character to Peter Grant, not being even remotely a wizard (though she can recognise vestigia when she feels it). She's saved from the risk of being a Dana Scully expy by being a committed Christian to the point it's bordering on a fault (she gets called out on it at least once).

The thing with the talking bears is totally a bait and switch, though.

Paranormal Nonsense, Blue Moon Investigations 1, Steve Higgs

This is another of those ridulously prolific authors who keep rolling across my Amazon ad feed, only when this one rolled across my screen for £0.99 in late August I paid enough attention to realise this series (he has about a dozen) is set in the Medway Towns, aka where I live. And it turns out to be a (largely) fun read with an unexpected ending, even if it's difficult to take a protagonist called Tempest Danger Michaels seriously. It does however have a major problem, Tempest Michaels is a complete dick, and so is his best mate/backup. Tempest is clearly an author expy (author was an army officer who took the option of having his commission bought out when the Army downsized, Tempest ditto, picture of Tempest on the cover looks like an idealised, buffed-up version of the author, Tempest has two dachshunds, author admits to owning two dachshunds, and so on), but some of the details don't work, he's trying to write Tempest as an ex-squaddie, not an officer, but the redundancy award for a squaddie is not going to be nearly large enough to let him drive around in a BMW X7 and afford a detached house in one of the villages near Maidstone (minimum of about £.5m worth, by my reckoning). The overall conceit is reasonable, Tempest is a paranormal investigator who doesn't believe in the paranormal, exposing the fakes is his thing. The problem is he's a sexist prig, any woman he runs into is assessed on her looks first, and his chance of getting "Mr Wriggly" inside her panties second - I wish I was exaggerating, and his mate is actually worse on this front. While the instant he runs into anyone from the working class* he turns into a Daily Mail leader writer who believes people get, or at least should get, ASBOs for not keeping their gardens tidy and their doors and windows painted.

The story here is a series of vampire-style killings which has Tempest investigating the world of vampire groupies, with a side-order of the Beast of Bluebell Hill, and they're both reasonably done, it's just that whenever he's off the clock or talking to anyone who's not middle class he turns into a complete holier-than-thou prig - 'I don't keep any form of white carbohydrate in the house' is a typical aside to the 4th wall.

The unexpected ending? The author's afterword in which he admits he realised later he should have made him 'kinder' (probably after reading a bunch of reviews calling him a holier-than-thou dick), but, while this is the rewritten version, he decided against changing him. And if he's going to stay like that I see no reason to continue reading.

* The one exception, his parents.

Soul Taken, Patricia Briggs

I should have reviewed this one in October, when I read it, because it's a very seasonal offering, being set at Halloween and pushing the horror-vibe a lot more heavily than usual for the Mercy Thompson series. 

Mercy and her husband Adam are busy defusing a potentially lethal problem - mysterious pack member Sherlock Post just got his memory back*, and one of the things he remembers is he's more dominant a werewolf than Adam, so either one of them walks, or one of them dies - when they are visited by a spooky apparition of Marcilia, the local head vampire, who gives them a deadline to solve an issue with the vampire seethe, who all seem to have disappeared. On top of which someone has made a film about a local urban legend - sort of Friday the 13th, but with a scythe, and bodies have started appearing with exactly the same MO, meaning the police are reaching out for the pack's help again.

Content warning for eye-scream, a lot of eye-scream.

There's a small bit of retconning around the Sherwood Post thing, the 'everyone always got him confused with Y, but he's totally a legend' explanation for 'He's X? How come we never heard of X?' doesn't really gel solidly. I'm not certain there isn't a larger amount of retconning driving the entire storyline, given it throws up backstory that rewrites how trustworthy a major character is, and sets up as inevitable a conflict we've already been told will destabilise the entire supernatural world if it happens.

* As a result of something that happened in the latest book of the related Alpha and Omega series.

The Viper's Nest Roadhouse and Cafe, Sam Quinn Book 6, Seana Kelly

Sam's friend Stheno (yes, that one, the gorgon), is opening a bar on the San Francisco docks as a business venture, so Sam and husband Clive, now retired from his role as Master Vampire of SF, are there for the soft-opening, when someone turns up dead by vampire and the police arrive all wondering why Clive's old executive assistant also just turned up dead by vampire.

It's pretty obvious who is trying to set up Clive, because his maker, Garyn is arriving in town tonight, what's not obvious is why. So Sam and Clive head over to vampire central for the reception, only for Sam to realise there's a problem - almost any vampire who gets in range of Garyn, especially the menfolk, is reduced to a simpering idiot desperate to obey her every wish. And Garyn is clearly not happy Clive married anyone who isn't her.

So it's Sam vs Garyn, or Sam and her allies versus Garyn and every vampire she's sunk her mental compulsion into in over a millennium of living as a parasite on those around her. Just as well Sam's just levelled up and her allies include a gorgon, several dragons, a half-demon, an Egyptian god, and assorted witches and dwarves.

Other things read:

The annual re-read of the complete Mercy Thompson series, plus a re-read of the other Rivers of London novellas and Amongst our Weapons as a warm-up for Winter's Gifts.

Recent Reading

The Burning Issue of the Day, T E Kinsey

Lady Hardcastle and Flo are called in when a Suffragette is accused of causing death by arson. The local Suffragettes are adamant she couldn't have done it. To complicate things, the dead man was a journalist, and his closest friend was the Bristol Post's society columnist, who has an unfortunate history with Lady H and Flo after the events of the previous book (A Picture of Murder). But the dead man left a notebook about his investigations and she's convinced he wasn't the random victim everyone is assuming. The problem is, the notebook's in code, and she doesn't know how to break it, but she does know a couple of retired spies. So arson in the streets soon escalates to corruption in high places, and Lady Hardcastle is uniquely suited to enraging self-important pompous oafs.

Death Beside the Seaside, T E Kinsey

Flo finally gets the holiday beside the sea she's been wanting ever since they moved to deepest Mummerset, even if it is just at Weston-Super-Mare. But taking the advice of friends means she and Lady Hardcastle are staying in a rather nice boutique hotel, with an interestingly varied set of residents: the Japanese diplomat, the Austro-Hungarian dandy, the Russian industrialist, the French naval architect, the wealthy American chaperoning her niece on a tour of Europe, and a charmingly batty British boffin who insists on telling them he's here for a secret conference. And didn't that man they just drove past look exactly like Lady H's brother Harry? (And with that set of characters aren't they missing an Italian and a German?)

Before you can say Punch-and-Judy guests are dropping like flies and the hotel manager is distraught, but he has a couple of retired spies on hand who happen to know the number of someone at the Foreign Office - Harry. So no sooner has someone dropped dead than a couple of likely lads from Special Branch are round the back of the hotel with a van, a a big bottle of cleaning fluid and an even bigger bag. It's rapidly clear that it's the Maltese Falcon scenario - hunt the maguffin with the last one standing the winner, but the entertainment's in the getting there - and for Lady H and Flo, this is entertaining.

(I liked the story, but there's some clear ret-conning of people's ages going on to set up Kinsey's new series - see below)

The Fatal Flying Affair, T E Kinsey

Lady Hardcastle and Flo have finally given in to Harry's nagging, and are now officially back with the Secret Service Bureau, or back with the Foreign Office at least as one of the reasons they retired in the first place is that the whole Great Game seemed to be being played for the private amusement of a bunch of amateurs, something the brand new Secret Service Bureau is supposed to fix. And as Harry points out, Europe seems headed for war, so getting back in the saddle is clearly the patriotic thing to do. That hasn't actually needed them to do anything so far, but now Harry has a job for them. An engineer at the Bristol Aircraft Company has fallen to his death when an experimental parachute failed. He was considered a national asset, and the parachute even more so. Worse, they know there's a spy in the company because they intercepted his last set of dispatches, but they killed the courier doing so and don't have any idea who his source was. Lady Hardcastle is a ditzy socialite with more money than she knows what to do with, and she has connections with the company via her good friends the Farley-Strouds. It's completely in character for her to waltz into the company offices proclaiming she wants to buy an aircraft and have her maid learn to fly it for her, giving them both an excuse to poke around under a few rocks and see what crawls out.

I liked this, even the aircraft details didn't annoy me - Kinsey notes his Bristol Aircraft Company isn't the historic Bristol Aircraft - but I have my concerns about putting Lady H and Flo back in the game. These are basically cozy mysteries (bar Flo's Tiny Welsh Ninja tendencies) and I'm not sure that set of conventions  entirely fits within the espionage genre.

The Deadly Mystery of the Missing Diamonds, T E Kinsey

It's 1925 and the Dizzy Heights are making a name for themselves as a Jazz band on the London scene. At the core of the Dizzies are Ivor 'Skins' Maloney and Barty Dunn, drummer and bass player respectively, who've been friends since childhood. But when they go home after a show Dunn heads off to his landlady's in Wood Green with whatever girl he's picked up, but Skins goes home to a townhouse near the British Museum and his wife Ellie, an American heiress (and the niece in Death Beside the Seaside above - the retconning I mentioned was knocking a good decade off Skins and Dunn's age to barely 20 so that someone who'd made a pass at mid-30s Flo in 1910 could fall mutually head over heels in love with a 16yo heiress in 1911 without it being deeply creepy).

Current home for the Dizzies is the Aristippus Gentlemen's Club, aka Tipsy Harry's, where they have a residency on Friday nights, and have also just landed a midweek job sitting in as live music for a gentleman's dance class, there being a dance competition with another club in the offing. And that brings them to the attention of Superintendent Sunderland of Scotland Yard, who has history with Skins and Dunn, and could use a pair of eyes inside the club. Sunderland has been charged with tracking down a few very special deserters from the war, and he's had a tip one of them is a member of Tipsy Harry's. The problem is the only description of the man is he's 5' 7" with brown hair, which describes pretty much everyone at the club, and particularly the clique of overly-privileged buffoons who can hire not just a dance teacher, but an entire jazz band to teach the five of them to dance and who are Sunderland's prime suspects.

Advice from Sunderland, and from Flo's letters to Ellie, tell Skins and Dunn that the way to make progress is to get the buffoons talking about what they did in the war and to pick out the one with flaws in his background. But that's easier said that done as everyone seems to be afflicted with a dose of "The War? Rather not talk about it, old chap!". And then death reaches out to the Dizzies, and things get personal.

There's a noticeable change in style with this new series. Whereas the Lady Hardcastle books are written in first person by Flo, these are third person, and Skins and Dunn are a couple of lower class likely lads. Ellie, on the other hand, comes straight out of Lady Hardcastle's world, if an American-accented version, and bonded hard with Flo in the aftermath of Death Beside the Seaside.

Currently Reading: 

The Ides of April, Lindsey Davis

It's AD89 and Domitian is Emperor of Rome, which means death squads in the streets. Flavia Albia's life has already been quite interesting enough, thank you - orphaned as a babe in arms during the sack of Londinium during the Boudiccan Revolt, taken in by a family of shopkeepers, fled their care when it looked like they were weighing up how much she'd fetch at the slave auction, lived on the streets of Londinium as a near feral child, then adopted by a senator's daughter and her ne'er do well boytoy/private investigator/Imperial agent (aka Helena Justina and Marcus Didius Falco) and brought to Rome, grew to adulthood among the Didii, married, and widowed at 20 - and now at 28 she's looking to avoid the attention of the authorities (death squads!) while living a quietly satisfied life working out of Falco's old office in Fountains Court on the Aventine as possibly Rome's only delatrix - a female PI. The only thing missing from her life is a little male company, and her latest case may offer opportunities with an interestingly snide archivist.

Not that she actually wanted the case, Flavia initially took on an accidental death case because she was short of cash  - child killed by builder's ox-cart with drunken driver - but on the wrong side, getting the owner of the building company, a thoroughly unpleasant woman, out of paying compensation.  But then her client dropped dead, and her adult son is insisting she investigate that death instead. Flavia Albia's all for going through the motions on a sudden death with no suspicious circumstances, but then she learns that her client isn't the only sudden death, and the authorities really don't want anyone looking into it, and uncle Petro's not in charge of the local Vigiles cohort anymore so avoiding the attention of the authorities suddenly became much more difficult.

I used to read the Falco books and it's about time I gave these a try. Flavia Albia is clearly a chip off the streetwise and cynical Falco block, but with the additional concerns of being a woman in a very male-dominated world - concerns illustrated by her living arrangements. Everyone knows she lives at Fountains Court, but most people assume she lives in Falco's old one room office at the top of the building. A few know she actually has a room in a four room apartment on the ground floor otherwise occupied by a foreign family who don't speak Latin. But the only people who know that that second room is a decoy, and that she only ever goes into it to hop straight out of the window and along the alley to a hidden door with its own staircase up to her apartment on the second floor - the best one in the building - are  Flavia and her landlords, aka Helena Justina and Falco.

Up Next: 

I notice I'm two books behind in Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson series, and one in the spinoff Alpha and Omega series, I'm currently debating whether just to reread the last couple to get back to speed, or to go for a full re-read.

Currently Playing: Valheim

Valheim came out of pretty much nowhere, then it went into early access on Steam in early February and started selling a million copies a week. I resisted temptation for a couple of weeks, but it just looks too good. It's a fairly standard sandbox survival game, much like Ark or Conan, but here the background is Norse Mythology. You're a Viking who just died in battle, but Hugin explains the drinks party at Valhalla is going to have to be postponed, Odin has a job he needs doing. When he created the worlds there were some evil beings he couldn't deal with immediately, so he threw them onto a world of their own - Valheim. And now he wants you to take care of them, even if you have been dropped off in the wilderness by a giant raven with nothing but the rags on your back.

So it's straight into the standard survival sandbox grind - clearcut the woods to build somewhere to live, terrorise the wildlife with improvised weapons in order to turn said wildlife into components of better weapons,  and eventually graduate to better tiers of materials - stone, bronze, iron etc. The complication being that to get access to the next tier you have to take out one of the bosses that Odin wants given a good seeing to. There's one boss per biome, and so far there are six biomes - meadows, dark forest, swamp, plains, mountains and ocean (I think) with an eventual nine planned.

Submitted my story "The Ship that Never Was" to the Derelict anthology (a couple of days ago, so not quite last minute). As I noted in the pitch letter, derelict stories are almost inevitably a combination of a sea story and a detective story, but adding a spy story element is a bit different. Some of you will have guessed from the title that I was riffing on "The Man Who Never Was".

Still haven't had any snow here, but we just had our first noticeably hard frost of the winter, with it not clearing from the roof tops until about 1PM.

I dashed around the garden like a mad thing for 15 minutes yesterday (didn't get out 'til 3:45 and it's dark by 4:15) picking up branches brought down by Storm Bella and completely filled the garden/recycling bin ahead of today's rubbish collection. Then found out later a) today's collection is happening Saturday, b) and they're not collecting the recycling bins.

I just answered the door to someone trying to deliver a parcel next door, only it's so long since I was out I couldn't find the front door key (turns out it was in my coat pocket) and he had to hand the package to me through the kitchen window.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon considering that a year ago I'd never have predicted being more interested in the parliamentary business coming after the Brexit Bill (the announcements on most of the country going into Tier 4 lockdown, plus what they were doing about schools), than in the Brexit Bill itself. I still think it's an utter disaster, but it comes a distinct second in comparison to Covid.

I'm going to be very pissed if my mother's second dose of the vaccine is delayed, because apparently in among the details of 'we can give the Oxford/AZ vaccine doses 12 weeks apart' was 'so we're also going to do that for anyone who hasn't had their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, even though there's no medical evidence to say that will work'. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/31/covid-vaccine-uk-doctors-criticise-rescheduling-of-second-doses

Recent Reading

T E Kinsey, Lady Hardcastle Investigates

Amazon has the ebooks for £0.99 so I thought I'd give them a try, and I really like them.

A Quiet Life in the Country

It's 1908 and the widowed Lady Emily Hardcastle and her lady's maid Florence 'Flo' Armstrong (our quietly lethal narrator) arrive in the sleepy Gloucestershire village of Littleton Cotterel, having rented a house newly built by a family friend who has had a change of plans and is staying out in India. It's rapidly clear that Lady Hardcastle and Flo don't have the typical Mistress-Maid relationship, dining together and being mutually sarcastic ('come, tiny servant', 'Fear not, aged employer'), and it soon becomes apparent that there's very little conventional about them, such as hints that the ditzy socialite would have had a first from Cambridge in Natural Sciences if Girton had been allowed to award degrees at the time, and that she and her tiny Welsh maid used to work for the Foreign Office, and as rather more than a diplomat's wife+maid. But, odd as they may be, they fit right into village society, getting on particularly well with Lady Gertie and Sir Hector, the local semi-impoverished landowners and ex-India hands.

So Lady Hardcastle is invited to the engagement party for Gertie and Hector's daughter, who is marrying the son of a well-established Bristol shipping family, and Flo is willingly loaned to help out the household staff. There's a band, and drinks, and dodgy guests, and a murder. So enter Inspector Sunderland of Bristol CID, who is pretty sharp. And he soon figures out that Lady Hardcastle and Flo are a sharp pair of eyes and ears for when he's not about. What he doesn't know is that Lady Hardcastle also has a second commission in relation to the party, and that the two are likely connected.

In the Market for Murder

When Gertie drags Lady Hardcastle and Flo out to the local cattle-market they're expecting a boring morning and maybe an okay lunch in the pub, not the excitement of one of the local farmers dropping dead face-first into his beef and mushroom pie. When it turns out that he was poisoned it seems like a job for Inspector Sunderland, but he's busy trying to unravel a bank-robbery plot, so deputizes Lady Hardcastle and Flo to investigate for him (I did find this a little unrealistic). Unfortunately (and traditionally) it turns out that the dead man was soundly hated by everyone who knew him, including his wife and son, so there's no shortage of suspects, nor of villagers leaping to conclusions about whodunnit.

Running in parallel with this are shennannigans among the local rugby club, for which Sir Hector is emeritus chairman. The team is having an unprecedented run of success and when it turns out that Lady Hardcastle's a fan and that Flo used to play wing for her local boy's team in the Valleys they're quickly adopted by the team. When the newly won trophy goes missing it's inevitable who Sir Hector should turn to for help, and just coincidentally the team is full of local farmers, aka the suspects in their other investigation.

On top of which there's a visiting psychic, nighttime disturbances by 'the spirits' at the local pub, where she's staying, and a new resident accused of murder by a ghostly apparition. This one is mostly down to Flo to investigate, given she grew up in the circus before her mother went back to the Valleys, and therefore knows all of the tricks of the trade.

Death Around the Bend

Lady Hardcastle and Flo are invited to a house-party being held by Edmond 'Fishy' Codrington, Ninth Earl of Riddlethorpe, who was one of her brother Harry's college chums. Fishy is launching his new motor racing team, so staying for the week alongside Harry, Emily and Flo are his business partner, his slimy racing driver, and his professional rival, the Austro-Hungarian Herr Kovacs (the obligatory sinister foreigner), while on the distaff side are Fishy's sister Lady Lavinia, and her friends the spiky Mrs Bellows and the meek Helen Titmus. Flo, of course, also gets to meet the belowstairs side of the household, including Mr Spinney, the amiable butler, Mrs McClellan, the coldly ferocious housekeeper, Morgan the mechanic/driver, and Evan, the lazy and arrogant footman, while she's sharing a room with Betty Buffrey, Mrs Bellows long-suffering lady's maid.

The launch party goes fine, but a race on Fishy's own household circuit between the male visitors (they toss a coin and the ladies will have to race second), ends in tragedy, with Fishy's unpleasant racing driver dead of a broken neck. An inspector calls, and quickly makes it clear he thinks the annoying toffs got what they deserved, and it was clearly an accidental death. Which is possibly a bit of a reach seeing as Morgan and Lady Hardcastle have already worked out one of his brake-cables was cut.

So with the police writing themselves out of the investigation, Lady Hardcastle and Flo are free to investigate, which is just as well when the murders start to escalate. But is it really all about Fishy's racing team?

And I'm now working on "A Picture of Murder", which I'm only a few pages into, but the author has clearly found himself a new reference book on Gloucestershire dialect and everyone is now calling everyone else 'my lover,".