My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Her face was pale with a glistening sheen of sweat. She blinked like a mole in a sunbeam.

The decor was as Lena expected: the ubiquitous chintz of a house decorated in the seventies. It smelt of mothballs and loneliness.

I wish I’d never borrowed from those scoundrels! … I should have known not to get involved with them as soon as I went to their office. It was above a Turkish barbershop, you know. Men getting their ear hairs singed off with matches while they drink coffee sludge and home-brewed liquor and chain-smoke.

The sun had made Islington like an oven. As she’d walked through Islington Green, she’d seen usually conservative Londoners rolling up their trousers and removing their shirts, lying prostrated around the tiny stretch of grass as if victims of battle. Tomorrow they’d be an assortment of shades of angry pink, bad-tempered and painful to the touch as they crowded themselves into humid tube carriages.

A pity such a heavenly face has been installed on an empty brain. Like painting the Sistine Chapel with crayons.

 My Review:

I was pleasantly entertained by this amusing cozy mystery, I certainly didn’t guess the outcome and I liked that I couldn’t. A Clean Canvas was the second in a series, and while I would most likely enjoy reading the first book, it was not necessary as this volume had strong legs and could stand, walk, and run well enough on its own. I always find it interesting to be given the view of an outsider and Lena was a hard-working and ambitious Hungarian immigrant who struggled with the nuances of the English language as well as the customs and idioms. She endeavored to keep herself contained but her malapropisms and keen observations were clever, colorful, and humorous. Lena was proud, and I was proud of and for her to have established her own cleaning company, and she always had her “eyeball open” looking for sidelines to incorporate and expand her business. I enjoyed Ms. Mundy’s style and characters enough to continue on with the next in the series with A Messy Affair.