Hazel Holt

Middle-aged widow and amateur sleuth Mrs. Sheila Malory probes a hotbed of small village animosities, betrayal, and murder after a mysterious killer bludgeons insufferable local poet Adrian Palgrave to death during the Taviscombe Festival.

The sleepy seaside town of Taviscombe has more than its share of gossips and schemers. It also has Mrs. Sheila Malory, a widow whose gift for judging character and unmasking murderers is as impressive as her knowledge of 19th-century literature. Mrs. Malory's sleuthing talents are tested once again when she comes upon the body of one of her friends, a sweet elderly lady. Miss Graham's death by poison is quite convenient for a local doctor of dubious...

While in Stratford, widow Sheila Malory always stays with her old friend, actor David Beaumont. On this visit she finds him in dire straits: his career is on the skids and his finances are in ruins. Unless he can convince his penny-pinching brother Francis to sell their jointly owned family home in the seaside village of Taviscombe, the bank will repossess his cottage. Francis, Dean of the Culminster Cathedral, does not believe that charity begins...

The death of a librarian in Oxford's New Bodleian library stirs Sheila Malory to probe the victim's past.

Gossip has it that the wealthy widow Edith Rossiter's scheming daughter is pressuring her to sign over a substantial inheritance against her wishes when Mrs. Rossiter--and her sleeping pills--disappear.

The sleuthing widow, Sheila Malory, leaves her cozy English village for a university in Pennsylvania to teach a course in literature. While there she investigates a murder, in the process providing a British perspective on American life. By the author of Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murders.

The sudden death of a schoolteacher at a prestigious English prep school sends Mrs. Malory to the school as a substitute teacher, in which role she becomes suspicious about the teacher's untimely death and about the strange behavior of her eerily obedient students. Original.