Elizabeth Edmondson, A Question of Inheritance

As I was reading this pleasant, "Very English" cozy set in small-town, post-war England, I found that for the life of me I couldn't remember how the first book in the series—which I reviewed here—was resolved.

There were allusions in this one to the unpleasantness of the late Earl of Selchester that that first book revealed, but the details still elude me. It would have been good if readers were reminded a little more strongly (but not too obviously) about the events of the past.

This disconnect was worsened by the fact that some events between the first book and this one were skipped here and evidently included in a novella. But who knew? You can kind of piece those events together, but one shouldn't have to.

I like the setting and the characters of this series well enough, and it's not as if it's a very complex story being told, so perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention. But I found that when the mystery of this outing's crime began to be unraveled in the last quarter or so of the book, I was forgetting characters and events that were important to that solution.

And I didn't care enough to go back and look very hard. Elizabeth Edmondson died in 2016, after this book was published and while she was at work on a third. That book, A Matter of Loyalty, was completed by Edmondson's son and will be published in October of 2017.