THE SUNSET YEARS OF AGNES SHARP

Swann follows up her tour de force Three Bags Full (2007) with a very English detective story in which the human characters are nearly as marginalized as the sheep who solved their shepherd’s murder.

Agnes Sharp has never wanted to go gently into that good night. To serve her neighbors and keep her own social instincts humming, she’s opened her home, Sunset Hall, first to Lillith Wright, then to an ever growing list of pensioners: blind former spy Bernadette; frequently addled Marshall; Winston, who uses a wheelchair; Hettie the tortoise; and Edwina, who practices yoga a great deal more mindfully than she bakes rock-hard biscuits. When the police visit to tell the residents about the fatal shooting of neighboring Mildred Puck, Agnes’ overwhelming reaction is relief, because now she and her housemates can drag Lillith’s corpse out of hiding and persuade Inspector Locke and Sgt. Tom Wink that both old ladies were shot by the same person. To Agnes’ consternation, it turns out that they were indeed both shot by the same gun, that whoever killed them isn’t finished, and that Marshall’s introduced Nathan, his grandson, into the household without authorization. Agnes’ memories of neighborhood dramas going back generations spark new directions for her sleuthing even as she wonders how reliable they are. Rooting the rhythms of her plot in all-too-real problems of aging—failures in mobility and memory, imprudent placements in eldercare facilities, hallucinations and confabulations, and the crowning indignity of being disbelieved or dismissed—Swann creates a world so witty and playful that readers may need to keep reminding themselves that there really is a murderer out there, or in here.

An antic, moving celebration of life’s final chapters.