Catherine Aird writes traditional British cozy mysteries featuring Detective Inspector Sloan and D.C. Crosby. This title is Aird’s one standalone mystery. When a heart attack forces Thomas Harding to retire from his high-pressure job and hectic life in the city, he and his wife buy a restored manor house in the remote English countryside. Thomas is not enamored of bucolic Calleshire County, with its provincial villagers and slow pace. Allowed little physical activity, he feels isolated and bored. Poking around the Tudor-era house, he discovers a priest’s hole dating back to its persecuted Catholic residents. As fascinating as this may be, even more fascinating is the skeleton walled up inside the hidden room. Thomas duly reports his find but encounters a lack of interest on the part of the local police, who are more concerned with the much more recent death of a female villager by strangulation. Thomas decides to investigate this old mystery on his own.
What is appealing is the way Thomas’ investigation unfolds. It is hard to imagine how such an old crime could possibly be solved with all of the principals dead and gone, but a fascinating process unfolds in which modern police methods are abandoned in favor of genealogical research and examination of contemporary historical documents. The reader is drawn into the story of the house and its past inhabitants, including the Barbary family, who occupied the house at the time of the skeleton’s interment. Through his investigation, Thomas also begins to make social inroads with various villagers, while at the same time noticing that some of them are mysteriously reticent on the subject of his house’s secret room. What are they hiding? The reader slowly starts to suspect that the village’s recent murder and the mystery of the old skeleton must somehow be connected. But how? It remained a mystery to me almost until the end, which made for a delightful reading experience.
I found this similar to Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, in which a bored, bedridden Scotland Yard Inspector comes up with an alternate solution to the famous mystery of Richard III and the murder of the princes in the Tower. And in Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead, Inspector Morse investigates an 1859 murder while confined to a hospital bed (unfortunately, the book is out of print, but readers can still view the episode The Wench is Dead from the TV series Inspector Morse).
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