24 July 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-99055013-3
Mavis, Carol, Christine and Annie, the four women who form the WISE Enquiries Agency, are growing concerned about their financial situation because, recently, they haven’t had enough lucrative cases and their bank balance is decreasing. Mavis is especially concerned; she is the oldest of the WISE women and the one who is mainly responsible for organising the agency’s workload. She is pleased when a paying client asks for their services, even though the case is unusual and potentially sinister. A female undertaker, representing her own business and several of her colleagues, approaches the agency because the undertakers are worried about wreaths that are being delivered by an unknown person who appears to be driving a hearse. The undertakers are concerned because the anonymous wreath giver delivers their offering before the person they are mourning dies.
Mavis accepts the case and hopes that Carol, the agency’s computer expert, will be able to turn up some insights. Carol is willing to do everything she can, but she is preoccupied by caring for her toddler son while her programmer husband is working on an international assignment that involves working all night and sleeping during the day. She is also distracted by a request for aid from a close childhood friend, Ellie, who is the Sister-in-Charge at a nursing home. Ellie wants Carol’s help because she is suspicious that one of the junior nurses may be stealing the drugs which are left when patients die, instead of using the official method of disposing of them. Ellie will not tell Carol the name of the nurse she suspects because she is uncertain whether she is right and does not want to be responsible for destroying the girl’s career. Carol wants to help Ellie, but she knows that Mavis will not approve of the WISE agency taking on an unpaid investigation.
However, Mavis is a retired nurse and she has strong feelings about the integrity of her profession, therefore she agrees to go undercover as a nurse at Ellie’s nursing home to try to identify the potential culprit and discover whether she is guilty of illegal practices. While Mavis tackles The Case of the Suspicious Sister, Carol, Christine and Annie will continue to investigate The Case of the Uninvited Undertaker.
The WISE women’s agency is situated in the Welsh village of Anwen-by-Wye, part of the estate of Henry Twyst, the Duke of Chellingworth and the estate owns much of the village. The Twyst family have been generous to the WISE women and Mavis lives with Althea, the Dowager Duchess in the Dower House. If the family need anything investigated, it has always seemed reasonable for the agency to do so, even when they are desperately busy. Now the Duke’s volatile sister, Clementine, has become engaged to a man with a mysterious background and her mother wants to know what her wayward daughter has got into this time.
As well as Carol’s struggles to balance family and work, two of her colleagues have things going on in their personal lives. Annie is gloriously happy in her relationship with Tudor, the landlord of the local public house, but they are tempted by the opportunity to buy a much bigger pub in the village, which would allow them to extend his business and offer rooms for holidaymakers, and, more important, have sufficiently large living quarters that they could move in together permanently with their two beloved Labradors, Gertie and Rosie. The problem is that they are uncertain whether they can afford to purchase the larger premises without compromising their financial security, especially when the seller is increasingly greedy. Christine’s problem is very different to that of her friend. Money is not a problem for her, as her father is wealthy and so is her fiancé, Alexander Bright, but having fallen in love with a man with a wild and somewhat disreputable past, Christine finds herself increasingly restless when she thinks he is settling down to respectable domesticity.
Mavis finds the pursuit of the nurse she suspects of drug theft both exhausting and perilous. In the meantime, the need to discover the identity of the person delivering unexplained wreaths becomes increasingly urgent as the suspicion grows stronger that the wreath giver may not merely be predicting deaths but also be responsible for them. The urgency becomes even more intense when friends in the village receive an unexplained wreath, but catching the perpetrator proves to be as dangerous as the investigators had feared.
The Case of the
Uninvited Undertaker
is the eighth book in the series featuring the women of the WISE Enquiry Agency
and their friends and neighbours in Anwen-by-Wye. It is another excellent
addition to a series of lively, fun books, full of warm and engaging
characters, with a true sense of community and inventive, multi-stranded plots.
The Case of the Uninvited Undertaker is an example of cosy crime at its
liveliest and best. It is a page-turner, which I recommend.
-------
Reviewer:
Carol Westron
Cathy Ace was born and raised in
Swansea, South Wales. With a successful career in marketing having given her
the chance to write training courses and textbooks, Cathy has now finally
turned her attention to her real passion: crime fiction. Her short stories have
appeared in multiple anthologies. Two of her works, Dear George and Domestic
Violence, have also been produced by Jarvis & Ayres Productions as
‘Afternoon Reading’ broadcasts for BBC Radio 4. Cathy now writes two series of
traditional mysteries: The Cait Morgan Mysteries (TouchWood Editions) and The
WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries (Severn House Publishers)
Carol Westron is a successful author and a Creative Writing teacher. Her crime novels are set both in contemporary and Victorian times. Her first book The Terminal Velocity of Cats was published in 2013. Since then, she has since written 6 further mysteries. Carol recently gave an interview to Mystery People. To read the interview click on the link below.
https://promotingcrime.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/carol-westron.html www.carolwestron.com
http://carolwestron.blogspot.co.uk/
To read a review of Carol latest book
The Curse of the Concrete Griffin
click
on the title
No comments:
Post a Comment