Dorothy Martin Series

English food is all well and good in its place, but for expatriate amateur sleuth Dorothy Martin, there’s nothing like a good Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings to make November seem complete. In the midst of the preparations, though, when Dorothy gets a call to help out for one day at the local school because Amanda Doyle just hasn’t shown up, she does agree to help; she was, after all, a schoolteacher. Things turn out very badly on Thanksgiving Day. As she awaits the arrival of her guests, Dorothy gets another call: Could she look after Mrs. Doyle’s nine-year-old daughter, Miriam? The child’s father has been murdered, and the murmurings over the wishbone are not part of any celebration Dorothy would have planned.

“Dorothy’s outsider status gives her a fresh perspective on village eccentricities. . . . Dorothy’s not exactly bland herself, given her penchant for detecting, her colorful millinery, and her phone-answering cat.”—Detroit Free Press

She was about twenty, with long blond hair, and her body was found a few days after she fell from the cliffs to her death on the rocks below. No one identified her; no one reported a missing girl. All the police knew was her rough age, that she’d had a child recently, and that she was very underweight. 

Her death was a mystery that had haunted Alan Nesbitt, Dorothy Martin’s now-retired chief constable husband, since 1968. It didn’t matter that the incident had happened more than thirty years earlier; under the pretence of a ‘vacation’ to Cornwall, Dorothy was going to get to the bottom of the mystery for Alan . . . and uncover a new one while she was at it.

Dorothy Martin is fitting in comfortably in her new English home, and now that her policeman husband, Alan, has retired, she’s looking forward to some quiet time with him. But then the letter arrives: an old acquaintance in Indiana has died and left her a small inheritance. It seems an excuse to travel back to the States and take a well-deserved vacation.

Dorothy should have known better. As well as the money, Kevin Cassidy has left a note predicting his own murder. It seems absurd; the beloved professor was ninety-six when he died, apparently from pneumonia. But Alan and Dorothy know about innocent facades. As Dorothy begins to investigate, Alan discovers that his wife’s sleuthing is hard work . . . and that here, Dorothy is very much in charge.

Dorothy Martin’s husband, a local police inspector, is out of town. On a trip to London for a doctor’s appointment, Dorothy talks to a young man who, by the time the train reaches Victoria Station, is very dead. No one seems to think anything is amiss and the man who told her he was a doctor and would take care of everything seems to have done just that. The body has disappeared. Dorothy has a mystery on her hands and, with her husband in Zimbabwe, there’s nothing to do but begin an investigation. She insinuates herself onto the staff of a computer software company and discovers not only a surprising killer but the lengths to which someone might go for the sake of a dream.