Crisis in the Cotswolds

Tope’s rambling 16th Cotswold mystery (after 2017’s Peril in the Cotswolds) finds nosy, intrusive Thea Osborn Slocombe struggling to adjust to life in Broad Campden as wife of alternative undertaker Drew Slocombe and stepmother to his two children. A crisis develops when Drew’s business partner, Maggs Cooper, tells him that she no longer wants to be an undertaker. Meanwhile, Drew’s latest client, Linda Biddulph, begs him to stop her late husband Stephen’s first wife and two sons from attending Stephen’s funeral, because she has never told her own grown son about his father’s other family. Drew is in a tizzy, trying to manage two warring families while trying to decide the future of his business. But as much as Thea wants to care about his problems, she finds herself obsessed with the murder of Juliet Wilson, a sweet, innocent, developmentally delayed young woman, whose body has been found in a field next to Drew’s green burial ground. Self-absorbed Thea isn’t easy to like, but the Cotswold setting will appeal to readers who enjoy cozy village mysteries. (Sept.)