Dying in the Wool

This is the first of a cozy mystery series by Frances Brody (pseudonym for Frances McNeil), set in post WWI England, and featuring protagonist Kate Shackleton. Kate received news that her husband was missing in action and has never been able to accept that he is truly gone. Like other women widowed by the war, she keeps searching, and has informally helped several women locate missing family members. When an acquaintance of Kate's from her VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) days writes and offers to pay Kate for her skills, Kate hesitates. It's one thing to help someone find a missing lover, brother, husband as an act of kindness, but quite another to consider taking money, which would make her more of a professional. Her father is a police inspector and so Kate's inquisitiveness and persistence have been encouraged. When he finds out that Kate might take a paying job with a very short deadline, he suggests she partner up with a former policeman who was never politically savvy enough to get very far--enter Jim Sykes. Jim can go where Kate often cannot and pretend to be people who Kate could not, so they make a good pair. Kate is an independent young woman, who continues to live in the house she shared with her Army surgeon husband, Gerald Shackleton. She drives a motor car--a Jowett --and decides her new partner needs to learn to drive as well.

Kate's first professional client, Tabitha Braithwaite, wants Kate to find her father who disappeared 2 years ago, and do it before Tabitha gets married in just 5 weeks. Tabitha's mother--and pretty much everyone else--think that millionaire textile mogul Joshua Braithwaite is dead.  When he was found battered and bruised in a stream a few days before disappearing, he was charged with attempted suicide--supposedly as a result of recently losing his son at the Somme--and incarcerated in a mental hospital. He escaped from there and was never seen again. But everyone Kate questions about the disappearance is holding back important information. Nevertheless, Kate uncovers enough clues to begin suspecting that he may have run away and started a new life. The mill is still being profitably run by Braithwaite's family--his wife and daughter and a cousin. Two murders at the mill, staged to look like accidents, suggest the possibility of foul play in Braithwaite's disappearance. And Kate may be next on the list of loose threads to tie up.

If you are a fan of the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear, you will like this protagonist and this series. Kirkus says of this initial outing that it "introduces a refreshingly complex heroine and adds a fine feeling for the postwar period." Publishers Weekly is a bit more measured in their review.