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Styx and Stones
Daisy Dalrymple Mystery, No 7

by Carola Dunn

    Aristocratic sleuth Daisy Dalrymple is back for a seventh case in this entertaining series, this time in rural Kent. Her brother-in-law, Lord John Frobisher, enlists her help when he starts receiving poison pen letters regarding a long ago misdemeanor. He thinks that other people in the village have been receiving them too, and can she investigate? Nothing looks more innocent than visiting her own sister and her family in company with her step-daughter-to-be, Belinda, but before she has done much investigating, she finds a body... in the churchyard!

Poison pen letters, villages full of gossip, tea at the vicarage... this couldn’t be more cozy if it tried and in a classic Agatha Christie style too. You will have to put on the kettle and make tea to drink while you read this! Ms Dunn does this style of thing very well, with plenty of period detail and a good underpinning of historical knowledge. It’s perfectly paced, and I didn’t guess it, although I did feel that the ending was a little rushed - a fault of this writer in some of her other books. But this minor fault did not detract from the enjoyable whole, and this remains a historical cozy series of which I am particularly fond. If you like this sort of thing at all, then this gets it all spot on.

Reviews of other titles in this series

Death at Wentwater Court, 1
The Winter Garden Mystery, 2
Requiem For A Mezzo, 3
Murder on the Flying Scotsman, 4
Damsel in Distress, 5
Dead In The Water, 6
Styx and Stones, 7
Rattle His Bones, 8 [review 1] [review 2]
To Davy Jones Below, 9
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker, 10
Mistletoe and Murder, 11
Die Laughing, 12
A Mourning Wedding, 13
Fall of a Philanderer, 14
Gunpowder Plot, 15
The Black Ship, 17
Sheer Folly, 18
Anthem For Doomed Youth, 19
Gone West, 20

The Book

Kensington Mystery
November 2002
Paperback
157566755X
Historical Crime - 1923 Kent, England
More at Amazon.com US || UK

The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2007
© 2006 MyShelf.com