A Most Agreeable Murder
The first sentence of this entertaining Regency-era page-turner from Julia Seales offers fair warning that tongue-in-cheek is its most appropriate dance style, despite its clever garments of both Agatha Christie and Jane Austen. Consider this English countryside description: “a small township called Swampshire, comprised of several lovely mansions and one disgusting swamp.” The mansion where the Steele daughters, especially the observant Beatrice Steele, must soon attend a ball is Stabmort Park. And Beatrice’s dreadful passion should at all cost not be revealed: She collects the printed news of crime and murder, even sending advice to a London detective—anonymously, of course, since “an unmarried lady writing to an unmarried gentleman was wildly lewd.”
Seales never holds back from a moment that can be ridiculous as she launches Beatrice into husband-hunting at the neighbors’ ball. As soon as Beatrice ducks into the powder room to freshen up, she finds “a painting of Great-Aunt Agnes Ashbrook hung on the back wall, her face so annoyed that it was almost as if she knew she was hanging in the privy.” From here on, one startling embarrassment after another tumbles into place. Beatrice forsakes her duty to wed, it seems, as she teams up in person with Inspector Drake. But how else can she handle a situation that evidently demands her research and leaps of imagination? Besides, the simple evidence suggests Beatrice’s own sister Louisa as a murderer, and clearly, that can’t be true. “And yet. Louisa was twenty-one. A woman—and a woman, perhaps, with secrets.”
Lively, tightly paced, threaded with flapping red herrings and deftly paraded clues, this debut novel from an experienced writer, screenwriter, and Anglophile can turn a reader quite unladylike, with bursts of snorted laughter.
