Murder at the Queen’s Old Castle

Harrison is at the top of her game in her sixth whodunit set in 1920s Cork, Ireland, featuring the Reverend Mother Aquinas (after 2018’s Death of a Novice). Joseph Fitzwilliam, the notoriously tight-fisted owner of a “shop selling cheap clothes and household linens” known as the Queen’s Old Castle, has offered to let the reverend mother take her pick of water-damaged goods to distribute to the city’s poor. While doing so, the religious leader is horrified to see Joseph, who’s clutching a small barrel-shaped canister used for transporting change, fall over a railing outside his office on an overhead platform to his death. The canister smells of gas, suggesting he was poisoned. Joseph’s hysterical widow, who witnessed his fatal fall, cries murder, then points her finger at 14-year-old shop employee Brian Maloney, accusing the boy of mistakenly killing her husband instead of herself. While the politics of the time are not central to the plot as in other entries, the fair-play puzzle is among Harrison’s finest. [em]Agent: Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency (U.K.). (Jan.) [/em]