UNTIMELY GRAVES

The rain-swollen River Kyne, overflowing its banks, sends a houseful of mud into Iris Osbourne’s treasure-filled cottage and an unidentified body into the fields just beyond, spelling trouble for Lavenstock’s Inspector Gil Mayo (A Sunset Touch, 2002, etc.) and his promotion-minded sergeant, Abigail Moon.

The flooding Kyne reminds Cleo Atkins how out-of-control her own life has become since she failed her university exams shortly after discovering that her longtime lover Toby Armitage preferred her twin sister Jenna. As her brisk, efficient mother Daphne frets, her recently retired policeman father offers her work at his detective agency, only to find that she prefers dusting parlors at her friend Val’s Maid to Order cleaning business to dusting for prints. When Dorrie Lockett’s Victorian (which Charles Wetherby, bursar of adjacent Lavenstock College, covets for the access it would afford the college to posh Kelsey Road) needs a good cleaning, Dorrie’s nephew Sam Leadbetter provides a promising distraction. So does co-worker Tony Gilchrist, and so does Cleo’s move into her late Aunt Phoebe’s eccentrically decorated house, recently vacated by American academic Brad Hunnicliffe and his wifty wife Angela. But it isn’t until her team is sent to wash the last of the mud off Osbourne’s Wych Cottage that the gun she spies in an antique dresser makes Cleo’s life really interesting.

Eccles’s carefully spun plot flows as briskly as the Kyne at flood. Her characters, though not always likable, are never less than believable.