This first in a cozy series called the Abbot Agency Mysteries has a clever catch. Bea Abbot has just been widowed and when she returns to London from the round-the-world trip she and her husband were on when he died she faces more than just the misery of life without him. Their event planning/fix it company is in trouble, there is a friend of the woman who has been keeping it afloat living in the attic, and her son and his brittle wife are all but moved into her house and are making plans to sell the company.

At first it looks like Bea, in her despondency, is going to go along with some of this. But as she begins trying to repair the company's tarnished name and to meet its obligations to other small businesses, she finds herself relying on the unreliable minder and her computer whiz friend in the attic to help her solve a murder that is mixed into the Abbot Agency's activities.

Bea Abbot is a particularly likeable protagonist and her son and his wife particularly unlikeable foils. A fine start to a new (in 2008) series that I intend to follow.

2011 No 199