Mrs Malory Investigates

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: The first book in the delightful British cozy mystery series featuring Mrs. Sheila Malory, a plain-spoken widow residing in the little seaside town of Taviscombe, England. When pretty but avaricious Lee Montgomery disappears, her fiancé Charles Richardson (an old flame of Mrs. M's) enlists Mrs. Malory's help. The dauntless Mrs. Malory soon suspects the worst. Little does she realize the terrible secrets her investigation will reveal....

Or this superior jacket copy from the UK reprint of the book: Everyone knows that impertinent Lee Montgomery is marrying Charles Richardson for his money. After Lee vanishes, Charles' friends breathe a sigh of relief. But Charles loves his pretty fiancée and is show more determined to get her back. He enlists the talents of Mrs. Sheila Malory, whose pastimes include reading nineteenth-century novels and ferreting out the truth. Mrs. Malory, a reluctant amateur detective, is soon convinced that Lee has been the victim of foul play. The residents of the sleepy seaside village of Taviscombe, England, are about to discover just how difficult it is to keep their terrible secrets with Mrs. Malory on the case.

My Review: This is a very good debut mystery, and a pleasure to read. Imperfect, of course, in that it feels a bit rushed, and some characterizations get slighted, but better that than the Dreaded Book Bloat that seems to afflict so many writers in the 21st century. "Why use one word for gore when fifty-six will do? Oh, split them between gore and sex? Naaah, sixty-eight words about sex. Emotions? Not unless it's a woman pining for/plotting revenge on an abusive man!"

*snore*

So here is Mrs. Malory, a widowed Marple-esque unthreatening Everylady of A Certain Age ("fifty-four, if I'm honest," she says charmingly) owned by a Siamese named Foff and a Westy named Tris, mother of an Oxford student, and lifelong resident of a seaside village that's so much like Jessica Fletcher's Cabot's Cove, Maine, that I raised my eyebrows into my hairline. As this now resides east of my ears, this is no mean feat.

I love moments in the book such as her reunion with her girlhood crush-object, her older brother's boarding school chum. Holt writes a short vignette of Mrs. M's girlish moment of Rapture as this older, handsome god grabs her for the final dance at the Hunt Ball, a memory she has while sitting in a tatty but clean cottage lounge across from the sixty-year-old wreckage of that beautiful boy. It is so moving, and so very much the way a person of this vintage feels and thinks (well, *I* do and so do most of my friends), and says volumes about the sleuth and the course of the series.

Imagine a mystery series set in Barestshire, written by Angela Thirkell's granddaughter, and there you have the affect of the series. Its effect on me was to cause me to reserve the next three books. show less

Hazel Holt is one of my top fave mystery writers, and somehow I missed reading this Mrs. Mallory book. There were few clues to lead me to the killer, and the motive was not even hinted at until the last few pages. I am usually pretty good at guessing the killer half way through the book, but I missed the mark here. This is why I ranked the book four stars instead of five. Most good mysteries provide enough clues to allow the reader to figure out the killer. The characters are familiar ones to readers of this series, so I always feel at home with them, and this gave me some background on them as it is one of the earlier books that I missed. The location is as always well described and I feel at home in Taviscombe as well. Readers will be show more glad to know the killer deserved what she got, the despicable bird that she was!! I wished Mrs. Mallory had just let things go and pretended she had not discovered the killer--but maybe (spoiler!!) that is what happened in the end, being as she gave the killer a chance to escape. show less

Sheila Malory is a youngish (54) widow living in Taviscombe in the southwest of England, where she has lived for much of her life and where she keeps herself busy with charity work and the occasional article about very obscure Victorian authors. Her old friend Charles Richardson visits home from America, where he’s been working for a multinational that has made him very wealthy, and asks her to meet Lee, his new fiancee, and of course Sheila is happy to do so. Lee turns out to be very much someone that Sheila instinctively dislikes, but even so she is shocked when some weeks later, Charles calls and asks her to try to find out where Lee is as she’s been missing for a while; she is even more shocked when she stumbles upon Lee’s show more body with a knife sticking out of her back…. This is the first of the Mrs. Malory series, a lovely cozy that I seem to have missed first time around, although as it happens I actually have two books much later in the series. I remembered liking them without remembering a thing about them, so when casting about for more cozy reading (I’m on a cozy kick these days), I put the author’s name in the Kindle store and “Gone Away” appeared. I’m glad it did, as Sheila is one of those characters who just grows on the reader - she has a life of her own, but is also very much involved in village affairs; indeed, a modern (-ish, the early books at least are set in the 1990s I think, before cell phones anyway) Miss Marple. There are some 21 books in the series, so I have much happy reading ahead of me; recommended! show less

First published as Mrs. Malory Investigates in 1989, Gone Away follows the investigation into the death of a gold-digging real-estate agent (“estate agent” in BritSpeak) who goes missing. The investigator, Sheila Malory, a retired widow, doesn’t even really like the shallow Lee Montgomery, who freely admits that her interest in her fiancé, Sheila’s friend Charles Richardson, centers on his money and his capacity to help her real-estate firm with his business acumen. (Charles, for his part, seems besotted with the woman, and he’s even planning on quitting his job in America with a multinational petrochemical company to come home and marry Lee.) But, despite her reservations about the betrothal, Sheila looks into the sudden show more disappearance because Charles has become quite worried about his fiancée, who has disappeared without a word to anyone — not even her office staff.

The first three chapters meander some, but the action picks up with Chapter 4. Who was blonde, beautiful, showy, self-absorbed Lee Montgomery really? Needless to say, Sheila Malory will find out quite a few unflattering secrets about the grasping woman — and about some of her friends, too. While Sheila’s preternaturally curious — what amateur detective is not? — she’s a good-hearted soul who devotes herself to mourning her late husband, now dead two years, and the good works that help her to cope in her bereavement. She’s a protagonist you can’t help but like. While I wasn’t that enthusiastic about Gone Away at the beginning, it grew on me — just like Mrs. Malory herself.

Sheila’s village lies on the Bristol Channel, and the stormy sea in winter becomes almost a character in this unexceptional British cozy. The descriptions of the Bristol Channel and of the seaside in the off season ranks as some of the best bits of the book. Author Hazel Holt’s no Agatha Christie — the dialogue sometimes sounds wooden and the secondary characters tend to be either flat or stereotypical stock characters — but Gone Away provides a decent enough cozy and the ending proves to be quite good. I’ll be sure to get around to the sequel, The Cruellest Month, this summer. show less

An old schoolfriend of Sheila Malory's now living in America is planning on returning to Taviscombe to marry a local estate agent. When his fiancee stops answering the phone and her secretary doesn't seem to know where she is, he asks Sheila to find out what's going on.

Delightful cozy mystery by friend and biographer of Barbara Pym.

Very good cozy mystery by a close friend of Barbara Pym; one can see the similarities in their world-view although the main character in these books is a widow with a grown son.

older sleuth, cozy, good sense of place and uses real locations which I always like. Hazel was guest on the West Country Caper