An Excellent Thing In a Woman

January 1, 2025
A wartime betrayal provides the solution to a 1947 murder. Iris Sparks--who's coping with the death of her lover, Archie, by drinking all the wine he left behind--has moved to a small canal boat and is back to working full-time at The Right Sort, a matrimonial bureau she owns with her best friend, war widow Gwen Bainbridge. Gwen's just begun a relationship with Salvatore Danielli, who works at the BBC and has known Iris since their days at Cambridge. Sally and Gwen are both deeply concerned about Iris. The Right Sort's newest customer is Laurence Haight, Sally's BBC colleague, who knew Iris during the war; both of them, along with Sally, had to sign the Official Secrets Act forbidding them to talk about their wartime activities. As a radio man, Laurence wants to meet someone with a melliferous voice. When Frenchwoman Jeanne-Marie Duplessis, who needs to be married by next Sunday, says she'll take anyone, the partners reluctantly agree to look for a match for her. Then, during a visit to the BBC that Sally arranged for Iris, Gwen, her son, and a friend to watch rehearsals for a new puppet show, a few sentences spoken by the puppeteer in German strike a chord with Laurence, causing him to pull Iris aside and ask her to meet him later to discuss it. Turns out he recognizes the voice of the puppeteer as that of a German who murdered one of the agents he monitored during the war. When Sally and his guests make a stop at a theater owned by the BBC, they find Jeanne-Marie Duplessis' dead body near a collection of props. The man in charge of the case, DS Mike Kinsey, Iris' former fiance, suspects Sally. In order to solve the murder and exonerate Sally, Iris must return to her wartime days and uncover clandestine information. A riveting, fast-paced mystery full of wartime secrets, romance, and psychological trauma.

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December 16, 2024
Montclair seamlessly blends fair-play detection, immersive period detail, and dashes of humor in her latest historical featuring matchmakers Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge (after Murder at the White Palace). In 1947 England, Sparks is mourning her lover, gangster Archie Spelling, who died in a shoot-out soon after he proposed to her. Bainbridge hopes that getting back to work at the duo’s matchmaking firm, the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, will help lift Sparks’s spirits. The partners get a diverting challenge when Jeanne-Marie Duplessis, a dancer who trained with the Paris Opéra Ballet but has been reduced to performing in nightclubs, seeks their help finding a husband in the next nine days so she can remain in England. Sparks and Bainbridge spring into action, but their initial objective becomes moot when Duplessis is found strangled to death in a BBC TV studio. BBC site manager Sally Danielli, who is both Bainbridge’s boyfriend and Sparks’s best friend, comes under suspicion for the killing, and the matchmakers must once again turn to sleuthing to clear his name. Montclair’s light, comic touch and gift for well-placed clues are on full display. It’s another solid entry in a dependable series. Agent: Mitchell Waters, Mitchell Waters Literary.