Established author Anastasia Hastings's first Dear Miss Hermione mystery, Of Manners and Murder, combines its two titular themes to entertaining effect. Violet Manville, daughter of a doting and recently deceased father, is stunned to learn that her Aunt Adelia is the force behind the Miss Hermione advice column in A Woman's Place magazine. Furthermore, Aunt Adelia is leaving London with her lover and informs Violet that she must become the new Miss Hermione, while also supervising Sephora, her teenaged half-sister.
As Violet begins penning pithy replies to lovestruck young men and misguided women, she worries about several letters from a distressed bride named Ivy Armstrong. She travels to Ivy's home village to investigate and discovers that Ivy is dead; Violet takes it upon herself to find out who killed her--and why. Meanwhile, Sephora is smitten with (and clandestinely meeting) a young man whose irregular habits are causing her some consternation. Violet, preoccupied with Ivy's murder, hardly notices Sephora's troubles, though Aunt Adelia's housekeeper, Bunty, keeps a sharp eye on both young women.
Hastings narrates her story mostly in Violet's no-nonsense voice, with occasional (and much more florid) interludes from Sephora. The sisters' troubles and Ivy's murder eventually turn out to be intertwined, as Violet discovers after much traveling back and forth between London and Ivy's village of Willingdale, peopled by classic characters of British crime fiction. Of Manners and Murder is both a gentle send-up of Golden Age detective fiction tropes and a witty, well-plotted take on the genre. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams