Death at the Dance
(A Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery #2)
by Verity Bright

Amazon / B&N

A masked ball, a dead body, a missing diamond necklace and a suspicious silver candlestick? Sounds like a case for Lady Eleanor Swift!

England, 1920. Lady Eleanor Swift, adventurer extraordinaire and reluctant amateur detective, is taking a break from sleuthing. She’s got much bigger problems: Eleanor has two left feet, nothing to wear and she’s expected at the masked ball at the local manor. Her new beau Lance Langham is the host, so she needs to dazzle.

Surrounded by partygoers with painted faces, pirates, priests, and enough feathers to drown an ostrich, Eleanor searches for a familiar face. As she follows a familiar pair of long legs up a grand staircase, she’s sure she’s on Lance’s trail. But she opens the door on a dreadful scene: Lance standing over a dead Colonel Puddifoot, brandishing a silver candlestick, the family safe wide open and empty.

Moments later, the police burst in and arrest Lance for murder, diamond theft, and a spate of similar burglaries. But Eleanor is convinced her love didn’t do it, and with him locked up in prison, she knows she needs to clear his name.

Something Lance lets slip about his pals convinces Eleanor the answer lies close to home. Accompanied by her faithful sidekick Gladstone the bulldog, she begins with Lance’s friends – a set of fast driving, even faster drinking, high-society types with a taste for mischief. But after they start getting picked off in circumstances that look a lot like murder, Eleanor is in a race against time to clear Lance’s name and avoid another brush with death…

Fans of Agatha Christie, T E Kinsey, and Downton Abbey will adore this tremendously fun cozy whodunnit, full of mystery, murder, and intrigue!

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Let’s hope this gown fools them and they don’t realise I’m as unladylike underneath as a frog in Wellington boots.

The poor old coot is as mad as a bucket of frogs.

Her tongue, it’s so sharp it’s incredible she doesn’t cut her own throat just by swallowing.

My Review:

I adore this clumsy and impetuous redhead with her infallibly omniscient butler and portly elderly bulldog. They make an exceptional crime-busting team as they bounce around their country lanes in their Rolls Royce. Her inner musings and personal observations were delightful engaging and whimsical, as was the crafty duo of authors’ smooth and seamless storytelling. The writing was pleasantly entertaining, cleverly amusing, and unpredictable and intriguing as well as true to the period with the deployment of colorful vernacular such as “you simple pimple,” “darling fruit,” and “the cat’s pyjamas.” I can’t wait to see what rib-tickling calamity this unlikely group of sleuths embroil themselves with next.

About the Author

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Verity Bright is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing partnership that has spanned a quarter of a century. Starting out writing high-end travel articles and books, they published everything from self-improvement to humor, before embarking on their first historical mystery. They are the authors of the fabulous Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery series, set in the 1920s.