Another boring cover. This could be the cover of any kind of mystery or even a romance. It says nothing about what this book is about or the mood it invokes or the detective that inhabits it. It seems to have been chosen because the murder is of an elderly lady in a village in England, and nothing says old lady and English Village like a flowered tea set.

Perhaps you’ve seen old episodes of Mystery that featured Inspector Barnaby, the detective in this series. This is the first book in that series. In it, we meet Barnaby, an older regional detective (not a Scotland Yard detective) with digestive problems, a lovable and loving wife who seems perfect except for her inability to cook an edible meal, and a leather-wearing young adult daughter with a mohawk and Troy, his lazy and shallow assistant.

The murder victim is, in a petty way, in an annual competition with her best friend to find a rare orchid in the woods. But, while searching alone late one spring afternoon, and after triumphantly marking her discovery of the orchid, she stumbles upon an illicit tryst between two of her neighbors. Although she is not open-minded about extramarital or premarital sex – it is the 1980s after all – she is unsure what to do next, aside from sneaking home to think more about it. But as she beats a hasty and discreet retreat, she stumbles, falls, and cries out and, as she flees, can hear pursuit behind her.

Safely in her cozy cottage – which Graham later describes through Barnaby’s eyes in such a way that I would not be surprised if the book ended with his order to purchase – she is unsure who to turn to. She isn’t sure who to confide in because she worries that they might reveal her secret. In fact, she is wondering how to reassure the participants that she isn’t interested and won’t say a word. She is on the phone with the Samaritans – a toll-free non-profit group that offers to “listen” when you are faced with something you don’t know how to handle – when there’s a knock at the door. The next day, she is found dead and the local doctor declares it death by old age.

Her best friend, however, is unsatisfied, and visits the local police station to ask for an investigation. Troy tries to discourage her – in addition to being lazy and shallow is particularly ineffective at it – and finally kicks her upstairs to Barnaby who listens with an open mind, interviews the doctor and correctly diagnoses that his work may not be accurate, and then visits the funeral home with a pathologist who does a cursory examination and recommends an autopsy – which reveals that the lady died of hemlock poisoning.

So then back to the victim’s house, this time in the company of the best friend who is the executor of the estate, who recreates the scene of when she discovered her friend’s body and, surprise, someone has replaced her jar containing parsley with fresh hemlock. And, she says, when she straightened up the house following the discovery, there was a single cordial glass on the table beside a bottle of her homemade wine. Then interviewing the Samaritans, Burnaby forms a theory that someone knocked on her door, accepted a glass of wine, poisoned her wine, washed and put away their own glass, and then snuck out, returning later to replace the parsley with hemlock after they heard about the autopsy.

Burnaby then accompanies the friend into the forest, where they discover the orchid flagged with the victim’s marker, and he finds the trampled area where the tryst took place and now knows what he is looking for. As he works his way through the village, he meets women and men that could be the participants and thus the murderer(s), and we wonder – is it the doctor’s wife? who would she be having an affair with? What about the doctor’s daughter and her crush on the local artist? The artist’s sister, who is engaged to a wealthy and paralyzed man, and his farm manager… There’s plenty of suspects to pick from.

But, it being a cozy English village, the murderer doesn’t stop with one murder.

The murderers and motive turn out to be prurient, something I don’t think you’d read in Agatha Christie, but the book is fun and you don’t see it coming. I’ve read this book a number of times and couldn’t remember whodunnit until I was half-way through.

The only thing is that it reminds me very much of Susannah Stacey’s work. Older detective with younger assistant, investigating the murder of an elderly woman at her cozy cottage in a English country village. I kept looking at this book’s cover, reading the summary, and wondering if I had read it before – but it had ended up on a separate bookcase from Stacey’s work (which is wrong and I don’t know why it Graham’s books ended up on that bookcase, other than that my books are all higgledy-piggledy this year), and so I kept thinking they were the same books.

Anyhow, worth reading again.