The only way is murder…

Lena Szarka, a Hungarian cleaner working in London, is forced to brush up on her detective skills for a third time when her cousin Sarika is plunged into danger.

Sarika and her reality TV star boyfriend Terry both receive threatening notes. When Terry stops calling, Lena assumes he’s lost interest. Until he turns up. Dead. Lena knows she must act fast to keep her cousin from the same fate.

Scrubbing her way through the grubby world of reality television, online dating and betrayed lovers, Lena finds it harder than she thought to discern what’s real – and what’s just for the cameras.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

The devil’s own food, wasabi peas… Why turn an innocent pea into a torture device like that? The Japanese have no business making snacks.

I remember when the internet was invented… I thought that this internet thing would never take off. So slow. And so much information no one cared about. Full of chat rooms with lonely people scattered all over the world, spelling badly and swearing at each other.

Lena felt as though she should work in a bar, the amount of alcohol and sympathy she’d been dishing out recently. Men certainly seemed to have a detrimental effect on women’s livers.

Mrs Ives took a biscuit and then put it back down. ‘I’m watching my figure,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to find myself a new man…. On second thoughts,’ she said, reaching for a biscuit, ‘I think I’d rather have chocolate than a man any day.’

In a funny way, things are better now… It’s like having stomach flu. It’s awful at the time, but then when you’ve recovered, you’ve lost half a stone and your jeans look great.

My Review:

I have thoroughly enjoyed Elizabeth Mundy’s wryly written cozy mysteries. I now feel compelled to go to the beginning and read the first in the series, as the last two have been cleverly entertaining. I definitely have a taste for Ms. Mundy’s sardonic sense of humor and cunningly paced writing style. Her well-contrived tales are more complex than most cozy mysteries and kept me guessing. I postulated and discarded several wild theories while I read. I adored Lena, the hard-working, ambitious, and highly observant Hungarian; she grappled valiantly with the complexities of the English language and confusing cultural issues while applying her special skills of deep cleaning and crime-solving, which for Lena went hand-in-hand. Lena did not believe in half-measures and took great care to accommodate her client’s quirks. I fervently wish I knew her contact information so I could send for her and her secret recipe of hand-made cleaning products to tackle my personal nest of accumulated detritus and filth. But please, don’t tell my mother that my sloth has put me in such dire need of such a service!