When one gets to a “certain age,” it’s a kick to read novels, especially murder mysteries, in which the main character is also a person of a “certain age.” And in Leonie Swann’s very clever “Miss Sharp Investigates” series, Agnes Sharp and her fellow pensioners, who all live together in Sunset Hall, her large home, prove that age is no deterrent to fighting crime.
In the third and last book in this delightful series, one of the residents of Sunset Hall, Bernadette, is getting married. Bernadette has not let the fact that she’s blind stop her from an exciting life, and her upcoming marriage to Jack, a former killer-for-hire, is proof of that. Serendipitously, there is an unexpected opening for an event at the nearby posh Foxglove Manor, so Agnes and her good friend Charlie are working on planning the happy nuptials.
However, Agnes can’t get over the unsolved murder from the previous novel, that of the verger from the local church, whom Agnes found entangled in the ropes of the church bells. She had decided she didn’t want to be involved and left the scene for someone else to find and report to the police. The mystery in that novel has nothing to do with the verger, but here we are in this novel with the verger’s murder (the police deemed it a suicide) jumping back into play.
A large part of the charm of this series is the group of people (and animals) who inhabit Sunset Hall. Edwina is ex-Secret Service; she loves reptiles and two of them, the boa constrictor Oberon and the tortoise Hettie, feature prominently in the story. Theirs are the only chapters wherein the narration is not from Agnes’ point of view. Edwina is also suffering from the start of dementia, or as it’s politely put in the novel, is “mad as a box of frogs.” There is Winston, who uses a wheelchair but is rock solid and steady. Marshall is former military and loves guns. He’s also enamored of Agnes. Charlie, as Charlotte is known, is tall, elegant, and adventurous. She approaches life with excitement, and she’s thrilled to be planning this wedding. Agnes, the bridesmaid, is not.
Agnes, the main character, is complex. She’s former police, and the house that is shared by the group was her house. She’s reliant on her hearing aids and her false teeth, both of which are problematic at times. Her legs are not as strong as she’d like; she uses a cane, and there is a lift to get to the first floor in the house (the second floor in American terminology). Agnes is straightforward and not given to romantic flights of fancy, so when Marshall asks her to marry him, she’s not sure what she wants. She’s happy with her life and determined to solve the problems that cross her path, such as murdered vergers and other dead bodies that seem to often appear.
When an unsigned letter composed of cut-out letters from magazines arrives at the house with a threatening message about the upcoming wedding, Agnes and the others are determined to get to the bottom of it. Nothing must ruin Bernadette’s happy day. There are several suspects and several dead bodies strewn along the way, including one of the invited guests to the wedding, who was also a private detective whom Agnes had hired to look into Charlie’s new beau to see if he might be the culprit.
There’s plenty of humor. For example, in one scene during the wedding events, Agnes and the others must hide the body that Hettie, the tortoise who has run away from her ring-bearer duties, discovers in the maze. Swann’s clever narrative describes the challenges of the senior citizens who are not quite as agile and able as they might have been in their younger years, trying to carry what is literally dead weight, to a place where the deceased will not be discovered (or uncovered) until after the happy nuptials are complete.
The action builds until the very end when we finally learn who the dastardly villain is and what his plan is for Bernadette and Jack. To say that the ending is a blast is complete understatement. It’s really not what one expects from a murder mystery at all. But it actually makes perfect sense and is a wonderfully brilliant conclusion to this fabulously charming series. It’s also worth noting that translator Amy Bojang has done a magnificent job in ensuring that the humor and wit in the German version of the story shine just as brightly in English.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.