Martin Edwards's top-drawer The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge, the third novel in the Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mysteries series, is ready-made for a Masterpiece Mystery! treatment: it centers on amateur detectives preoccupied with a history of strange disappearances in rural England. But readers would be mistaken to presume that this is a quaint cozy helmed by genteel gumshoes.
It's 1930, and hard-drinking, cigar-chomping London crime reporter Nell Fagan is visiting Yorkshire's Blackstone Fell under false pretenses. Impersonating a photographer, Nell is renting the tower gatehouse at Blackstone Lodge, having been asked by a young man to look into his mother's death at Blackstone Sanatorium. The more Nell learns about Blackstone Lodge's "curse"--one man vanished from the lodge in 1606, and another in 1914--the warier she becomes. Narrowly avoiding a charging boulder surely intended for her convinces Nell to enlist the help of enigmatic puzzle-solver Rachel Savernake--if the woman can get past her bad history with Nell.
One character--another reporter--could be summing up the experience of reading The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge when he says, "The tranquillity of an idyllic English village shattered to smithereens. What more could our readers possibly ask for?" Well, an annotated cast list would have helped readers keep track of the novel's innumerable characters. But CWA Diamond Dagger winner Edwards (The Golden Age of Murder; Silent Nights) provides another means of assistance: a back-of-book "cluefinder," an antiquated device that offers solving pointers. It's the icing on this highly satisfying throwback cake. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer