This is a traditional mystery series with a modern heroine, Kate Shackleton, who runs a detective agency with her assistant Sykes a retired policeman, and her housekeeper who acts as a sometimes aide/secretary. What sets this series apart to me is that it captures the essence of a time as the modern era clashes and challenges the traditional in post WWI England and typically features some aspect of the new era, in this mystery it’s a pageant for North Riding Brewery queen and the use of branding as a marketing tool.
Continue reading “Murder is in the Air by Frances Brody – A Kate Shackleton Mystery”
This was the 1st in a new series for Barbara Ross and as much as I enjoyed the Maine Clambake Mystery series this one might be even better, possibly because I relate to the age and sensibility of Jane Darrowfield. As a retiree with extra time Jane gets involved in helping her friends and relatives out of some delicately tricky situations and gains a reputation that brings a paying opportunity to her door. The assignment is to infiltrate a closed community, a senior assisted and independent living community to provide insights and advice to the facility’s manager who is struggling to resolve some troubling dynamics in the community.
This series features a Southern gal in sunny California married to a police detective whom she met when she was a cop. Savannah is now a Private Investigator who calls on a loosely knit group of relatives and friends known as the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency to help with research and investigating suspects.
Another amazing mystery in this series, dazzling in its intensity and suspense, politically charged, the underdog and the corrupt are again the focus with the amazing V. I. Warshawski getting drawn into two seemingly unrelated mysteries, one to protect her friend’s nephew and the other to find the missing niece of her ex-husband. This is a very timely mystery involving the Russian mob, a corrupt Billionaire, teams of wily lawyers, abused young women, Muslim émigrés and ancient mid-Eastern stolen art objects. Wow!
Sixty something Poppy Harmon is newly widowed and flat broke and is living in Palm Springs, CA and forced to find a new career she decides to become a Private Investigator because – as a former TV star in a popular PI series from the 1970s – that qualifies her or at least in California it does. Her best friends, Iris and Violet, polar opposites, and Violet’s 12 year old grandson a tech whiz, all sign up to assist and a new enterprise is born in Iris’s garage. One small problem, no customers. So Poppy convinces her daughter’s boyfriend Matt, a struggling talented actor, to be the face of the business. The ploy actually works! And they soon have a rich and well known client, a former movie star, whose house was robbed and her valuable and uninsured jewelry stolen.
