Blood on the Wood (2003)

Comments soon, catching up.

Linscott's spirited suffragette, Nell Bray, finds herself explaining to the police how she discovered a body in the course of a midnight robbery as this mystery of murder and politics in early 1900s Britain gets underway.

It all happened because a valuable painting, bequeathed to the Women's Social and Political Union, turned out to be a fake - commissioned after its owner's death by her husband, Oliver Venn. So, when a splinter group of the Fabians - the Scipians - gathers to camp at the Venn estate, Nell decides to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, by sounding out the Scipians' commitment to women's suffrage while confronting Venn about the painting.

It's the younger Venn son, Daniel, a collector of folk music, who comes up with the plan that Nell should steal the picture that's rightfully hers. Daniel has also just got himself engaged to a silent, abused member of the agrarian classes, no matter that he's already engaged to quite a nice woman of his own sort. It's the downtrodden waif who turns up dead during Nell's quasi-sanctioned theft.

The historical detail, from ladies' fashions to radical politics, merges unobtrusively with the mystery through the likable and entertaining voice of the intrepid Nell. Her sleuthing skills emerge naturally from her forthright personality, as do her well-reasoned forays into the woods in the dead of night after a killer.

I really didn't pick whodunnit right till the last few pages. A delightful read recommended for the cosy historical mystery lover. ( )