Mystery by the Sea
(A Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery #5)
by Verity Bright

Amazon / B&N

A magnificent seaside hotel, striped deckchairs, strawberry ice cream… and a rather familiar dead body? Lady Swift is on the case!

Spring, 1921. Lady Eleanor Swift, explorer extraordinaire and accidental sleuth, hasn’t had a vacation since she arrived in England a year ago. Being an amateur detective can be a rather tiring business and she is determined to escape any more murder and mysteries. So she books into the Grand Hotel in the fashionable resort of Brighton for some fresh air, fish and chips and, of course, a dip in the ocean.

Eleanor is enjoying her view of the waves and trying to find her bathing suit when calamity strikes: a guest has been found dead at her beautiful hotel. The distraught manager, who can’t afford a scandal, asks Eleanor to solve the case as swiftly as possible. Thank goodness she has her partner in crime – Gladstone the bulldog – to help her sniff out the dastardly culprit.

But when Eleanor enters the dead man’s room, she receives a shock big enough to make her forget even the finest ice cream sundae. The body is that of her husband, who supposedly died six years ago on the other side of the world. Has he been alive all these years? Why does he have a copy of their wedding photograph with a cryptic message written on the back? If Eleanor can keep herself safe long enough to find her husband’s killer, she might discover that everything is not quite as it seems beside the seaside…

A warm and witty whodunnit! Fans of Agatha Christie, T E Kinsey, and L.B. Hathaway will be utterly charmed by this addictive and absolutely gripping page-turner.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

One of her most treasured memories filtered into her mind. Her mother tucking her up in bed after an upsetting experience and whispering, ‘Sleep well, darling girl. All will be fine, I promise, because tomorrow doesn’t know what happened today.’

He is absolutely wonderful, genuinely. Yet at least twice a day I want to boil his head.

Widowed? Twice, as well. To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose the same one twice looks like carelessness.

My Review:

I have vastly enjoyed every one of the brain-teasing, curiosity prickling, and wryly-humorous tales in this delightfully entertaining series. Picking up one of these fun missives has always proven to be a refreshing change of pace. The endearing and humorously detailed characters are a delectable feast of extremes while the murder mysteries they find themselves embroiled in have been cleverly plotted, highly active, well nuanced, smartly textured, unpredictable, and have kept the little pea in my brain hopping. I adore Eleanor and her witty sidekick butler. She is a woman I would enjoy as a friend at any age and in any time period. As with all the previous books, the writing style was comfortable and flowed as smoothly as a movie reel while being true to the period and well researched. I hope the writing duo of Verity Bright continues this engaging series into perpetuity as I could never tire of them.

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.