Book info

• Title Mrs, Presumed Dead
• Author Simon Brett
• Year 1988
• Genre Mystery

Meet Mrs Melita Pargeter, a vivacious widow with a talent for solving mysteries. Melita moves to a lovely new home in leafy Surrey, where her neighbours are well-to-do young couples. But then her boiler breaks down, and she tries to get in touch with the former owners, Mr and Mrs Cotton. It turns out they have vanished without trace. Melita is curious. She finds out that Theresa Cotton was young, happily married (or so it seemed), and very nice in every way. Then she discovers a letter with some shocking revelations. Nice Mrs Cotton was mixed up with some very shady characters. Melita’s determined to piece together the mystery, but her snooping hasn’t gone unnoticed. Does the killer now have another Mrs in his sights?

Thoughts

Another great Mrs Pargeter mystery novel, this time our intrepid heroine has joined a keeping-up-with-the-joneses style neighbourhood and spends some time figuring out each of her neighbours, before realising that one of them killed the person who owned her house before her. She naturally gets very involved in the investigation, and gets to the answer well ahead of the police, with a little help from the friends of her late husband. An enjoyable read, and another cosy mystery solved!

Rating: 5 / 5