Superficially these are about as cozy as it gets - set in a small English village, with an older-woman protagonist who spends a lot of her time on such things as village volunteering, helping with her granddaughter, and cooking. However, while Sheila Mallory is someone you'd enjoy having as a comfortable friend (something I've never felt about Miss Marple, another deceptively cozy-seeming sleuth), she's also full of clear-sighted intelligence and integrity. You experience the story through her non-fluffy eyes, making them equally non-fluffy cozies: what I prefer to call traditional mysteries.

Loathsome cousin Bernard has threatened, er, promised, a visit. In retirement, he's taken up genealogy and intends to force everyone in the family he can reach to help him fill up the family tree; while boring them further by "sharing" on the subject with all the relentless demagoguery of a former schoolmaster. Unfortunately it appears he's also been digging up skeletons buried under the family tree and letting their owners know. Almost inevitably, his body is found with his head beaten in. Was this the inevitable result of telling people he knew their secrets, or something else entirely - loathsome as he was as a visitor, what must he have been like for his immediate family to live with all those years? Sheila may not have liked him much, but a mixture of intellectual curiosity, belief in justice, and concern for other members of her own family means she has to find out what happened.

This is one of the best entries in a series full of vivid characters, with plots based in solid puzzles that play fair with the reader, fluidly written with an admirable sense of place. Highly recommended.