Lady Darling Inquires After a Killer, by Colleen Gleason

The cover caught my eye, then the blurb–for all that it’s concise almost to the point of being off-putting–clinched the deal when it mentioned our lady sleuth’s age, so of course I requested an ARC. Which promptly got buried in the TBR cordillera of doom for about nine months. Oops. Alas, despite being mostly readable, I grew annoyed. Beware: sex pest making moves; repeated mentions of drinking; unsubtle references to domestic violence; vigilantism; DNF review. Lady Darling Inquires After a Killer, by Colleen Gleason This novel, set in 1898 London, is my introduction to the author’s work, though she does have a respectable backlist, and writes under various pseudonyms in a variety of genres; it is also the first novel in the Lady Darling series, where our amateur sleuth is a widow with four grown offspring, all happily married off, who, while eager to go bury herself in the country, finds herself embroiled in the investigation of a couple of murders. Here’s how the publisher sets up…