Murder in the Crescent: A Gadabout Club Cozy Mystery — Book Four

One man with a fatal nut allergy. Three hundred people in masks. A hundred and forty identical green coats.Bath, Regency Week, and a masked ball at the Assembly Rooms.Sir Anthony Peel's allergy is not a secret. It is a standing item on an agenda, a laminated notice on an office wall, and a line in the minutes six years running. Everybody knows. That is the point of it.He is found on the cloakroom floor at twenty past ten with his mask still on, one shoe off, and ticket 106 in his hand. The pen in his pocket was not enough. The second one was in his coat.And the coat hanging on the rail under his number was a size he had never worn in his life.Four days later the police walk Arthur Ferrier out of a council waiting room at twenty-five to seven, past sixteen people holding numbered tickets, and the Gadabout Club find out what they are actually made of - while a 1974 school bus sits three streets away under a yellow clamp."This one's an Austen," Margo says. "And an Austen is not about love and it is not about bonnets. It is about money, and it is conducted entirely through manners. Nobody in an Austen ever says the thing. Everything that matters is done in a carriage, or a doorway, or at the edge of a dance, so politely that you could not repeat a word of it to a magistrate."MURDER IN THE CRESCENT is the fourth Gadabout Club mystery - warm, funny, fairly clued, and for readers of Richard Osman, Faith Martin and Helena Dixon. It stands entirely on its own.