Alex T Smith
Hodder
When the extended Gristle family are summoned to their ancestral home by Ignatious Gristle, family patriarch and extremely unpleasant individual, they don't expect to hear he is getting married. Things take an even more surprising turn when he is murdered in the middle of the night. With a snowstorm trapping the family in the old rambling house, and the sole telephone out of order, it falls to the youngest member of the family to uncover the circumstances of this murder mystery.
With a wonderfully eccentric cast of characters and a conveniently isolated, pre-war country house setting, this book is a pitch-perfect take on the golden age of crime. In Edna Gristle readers have an irrepressibly curious and very amusing narrator and the plot is full of twists, turns and red herrings enough that the eventual conclusion is highly satisfying. Fans of Robin Stevens and Enola Holmes should really enjoy this first volume in a promising new series.