Dying in the Wool

Amateur sleuth Kate Shackleton, whose usual avocation is searching for servicemen who went missing during the Great War, faces a tight deadline in Brody’s stately second English historical (after 2010’s A Medal for Murder). In 1922, at the behest of Tabitha Braithwaite, an acquaintance of Kate’s from the days they were both with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, Kate must find Bridgestead mill owner Joshua Braithwaite, Tabitha’s father, who disappeared in 1916, before her wedding in five weeks to Hector Gawthorpe. Rumors abounded in the local wool mills at the time that guilt-ridden Joshua, a suspected womanizer, tried to drown himself after his soldier son was killed on the Somme. A further complication was his objection to Tabitha’s marrying the unemployed Hector, who may hold a clue to Joshua’s fate. Brody takes her time drawing together the missing threads of this mostly gentle cozy. Agent: Judith Murdoch, Judith Murdoch Literary Agency. (Feb.)