The leisurely pacing and some unnecessary side characters made this otherwise perfectly enjoyable book hard to get through. That said, I’ll probably read the others in the series. Not a cozy mystery but not gruesome either, it hit the right notes . ( )

3.5* Enjoyable start to this 1920’s set mystery series ( )

Like so many other Englishwomen in the 1920s, 31-year-old Kate Shackleton is a war widow. She is living on her own and has had some success in tracking down missing men for friends - sometimes the men died in the War, sometimes they just left their former life to start anew. She is excited, if nervous, to take her first paying case - a fellow Voluntary Aid Detachment woman, Tabitha, asks her to see if she can locate her father, who went missing in 1916, so that he can walk her down the aisle at her upcoming wedding. The family owns a wool mill and is very prominent in their region, but the general consensus is that the man, distraught over the death of his son, killed himself; Kate, however, soon finds that nothing is quite as it appears and that the gap of six years since his disappearance has only served to further muddy the waters…. This is the first novel in a series, and it’s got all the things I like in a cozy: interesting historical period, characters who leap off the page as fully-realized people, a complicated plot and settings that come to life in the author’s hands. I’ve read some cozies in which it’s painfully obvious that the author did minimal research, if any, but that is not the case at all here - I now know more about the manufacturing of wool than I ever will need to know (and I mean that in a good way). I’m looking forward to spending more time with Kate and with Mr. Sykes (Jim, not Bill), her sort-of sidekick, and am pleased to see that there are a dozen more books to read; recommended! ( )

I didn’t know what I was going to get with this mystery. I’m on a break for holidays with both work and school and have been mostly reading lighter fiction. From the book cover one may assume that this would be a cute and cozy mystery but i was pleasantly surprised to see that it was cozy yes, yet still very cerebral. I look forward to reading more in the series. ( )

A good murder mystery. Excellent attention to period detail and the problems of post WW1. ( )