Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Even the crooks are nice.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. How has the Duke raised the money to begin restoring long-neglected Penford Hall? Did he somehow make off with the missing fortune of Lex Rex, the head-banging rock star who drowned while joyriding in the ducal yacht five years before? And who shoved supermodel Susannah Ashley-Woods, the cousin the Duke gently says was raised by wolves, down the garden steps? All the ingredients of the feminine gothic-one ghost, one relic, three mysteries, a second chance at love-at their most jolly and toothless. But there are awkward questions to answer before she can find the lantern and take Derek's delightful children in hand. Speeded on her way to Penford Hall by a pair of earthbound spirits who arrange for her to be offered a job as gardener (!), Emma falls hard for the well-bred love-in among the Duke's adoring household-especially the conveniently widowed Derek Harris, the historian who's restoring an important stained- glass window. This time, she's determined to bring forlorn, 40ish American computer executive Emma Porter, on a visit to Cornwall she'd hoped to take with her live-in lover until he dumped her for a trophy twit, to Penford Hall, where Grayson Alexander, the 14th duke, needs her to help unearth a storied lantern Aunt Dimity had charged him to recover. The most unusual continuing character in contemporary mystery fiction-the late Dimity Westwood, universal aunt and presiding spirit of British home and garden (Aunt Dimity's Death, 1992)-is at it again.

Aunt Dimity's Death by Nancy Atherton