The Corpse at the Crystal Palace: A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery

Set in 1928 London, Dunn’s bright and breezy 23rd Daisy Dalrymple mystery (after 2015’s Superfluous Women) provides an appealing glimpse of life among the well-to-do. When two teenage cousins arrive for a visit, Daisy takes the cousins, her three-year-old twins, and the twins’ nurse, Nanny Gilpin, on an outing to the Crystal Palace. At one point, Nanny excuses herself. Daisy later goes looking for Nanny in the ladies’ room, where she finds a dead woman she initially mistakes for Nanny in one of the stalls. Meanwhile, the twins run into the park, where they discover Nanny lying in a pond, half-drowned. The police are unable to identify the body, and Nanny suffers from memory loss. Are the murder and the attack on Nanny related? And who is responsible for these outrages, committed in such a public place? Daisy uses her connections among the “bright young things” and the more bohemian Chelsea set in an attempt to get the answers. Fans of Dorothy L. Sayers’s gentleman sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, will find much to like. Agent: Alice Volpe, Northwest Literary Agency. (July)