Everyone in the small seaside village of Taviscombe is looking forward to the festival. So is Mrs. Sheila Malory-that is, until the unpleasant Adrian Palgrove joins the planning committee. Mrs. Malory, an avid reader of nineteenth century literature, is dismayed to find the man constantly in her path. First Adrian gleefully informs her that he has been appointed executor of the estate of a renowned author, whose private life he intends to expose. Soon his bad behavior has alienated his fellow committee members. One of his many enemies despises him enough to murder him just as the festival is...

Everyone knows that impertinent Lee Montgomery is marrying Charles Richardson for his money. After Lee vanishes, Charles' friends breathe a sigh of relief. But Charles loves his pretty fiancee and is determined to get her back. He enlists the talents of Mrs. Sheila Malory, whose pastimes include reading nineteenth-century novels and ferreting out the truth. Mrs. Malory, a reluctant amateur detective, is soon convinced that Lee has been the victim of foul play. The residents of the sleepy seaside village of Taviscombe, England, are about to discover just how difficult it is to keep their...

Mrs. Edith Rossiter, a rich matron, also has a wealth of greedy relatives-a cold-blooded daughter, a wastrel son, and a desperate sister. Because she is in excellent health, none of them can hope to inherit anytime soon ... So when Edith vanishes from Taviscombe's finest nursing home, the police suspect the worst, despite the lack of evidence. Mrs. Rossiter was a close friend of Mrs. Sheila Malory, who as usual applies her skills as an amateur detective to delve into the lives of the missing woman and her hopeful heirs. Was Edith addicted to sleeping pills? What did the mysterious couple seen...

Widow Sheila Malory has been looking forward to her stay at the Bodleian Library in Oxford as a chance to research wartime women writers and catch up with old friends from her college years, the one "purely happy" time in her whole life. Her relaxing idyll is interrupted when a librarian, Gwen Richmond, is crushed to death beneath collapsed bookshelves. After the "accident" proves to be murder, Mrs. Malory's godson Tony, who also works in the library, asks her to help investigate. Gwen was manipulative and unpleasant, so there are no shortage of suspects. The dead woman's World War II diary...

A British Regency murder mystery/romance set in 1815, written "with the assistance of Jane Austen's letters." Balls, visits, courtships, gossip (and murder, of course!). Especially for readers who love Jane Austen, Sharon Lathan, Georgette Heyer and Barbara Pym.

Everyone knows that impertinent Lee Montgomery is marrying Charles Richardson for his money. After Lee vanishes, Charles' friends breathe a sigh of relief. But Charles loves his pretty fiancee and is determined to get her back. In this quest he enlists the talents of Mrs. Sheila Malory, whose pastimes include reading nineteenth-century novels and ferreting out the truth. Mrs. Malory, a reluctant amateur detective, is soon convinced that Lee has been the victim of foul play. The residents of the sleepy seaside village of Taviscombe, England, are about to discover just how difficult it is to...

While in Stratford, widow Sheila Malory always stays with her old friend, actor David Beaumont. On this visit she finds him in dire straits: his career is on the skids and his finances are in ruins. Unless he can convince his penny-pinching brother Francis to sell their jointly owned family home in the seaside village of Taviscombe, the bank will repossess his cottage. Francis, Dean of the Culminster Cathedral, does not believe that charity begins at home. He refuses to put the house on the market or provide a loan. Mrs. Malory offers David a place to stay in her own home in Taviscombe so...

'Could one write a book based on one's diaries over thirty years? I certainly have enough material, ' wrote Barbara Pym. This book, selected from the diaries, notebooks and letters of this much loved novelist to form a continuous narrative, is indeed a unique autobiography, providing a privileged insight into a writer's mind.
Philip Larkin wrote that Barbara Pym had 'a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies of everyday life'. Her autobiography amply demonstrates this, as it traces her life from exuberant times at Oxford in the thirties, through the war when, scarred by an unhappy...