If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Review
I’m grateful to the author, NetGalley, and HarperCollins for the advanced reader’s copy of this book, out on 24 October 2024.
This is a glorious concept: Mrs Beeton (she of the infamous Book of Household Management) has a distant relation who, in 2024, is running the Good Household Management Agency that gets unexpectedly caught up in a murder and its investigation. I have a few minor grumbles about the references to Victorian literature of other kinds, but the premise is solid, and the play with Mrs Beeton’s book interesting and useful to characterisation.
This is a pleasing cosy in many ways, and I enjoy the successful mid-life “spinster” main character; there are some moments of great pathos and humanity, as well as great humour and tenderness in the relationships she has with long-standing and new friends along the way. The principal professional detective (in narrative importance, at least) is a pleasant change from some of the stereotypical gruff middle-aged men we might get in that role.
More broadly, it’s great to get back to what feels to me to be the very genuine heart of the detective fiction genre, when in the nineteenth century snooping (or thieving!) servants were a major concern and so many of the female detectives of the period went about their work by slipping into a maid’s uniform, as Alice Beeton herself does here, going “undercover” to investigate a murder somewhat accidentally, because she simply can’t get the staff in time.
My one main complaint: this book takes a little while to get going; we’re 25% of the way through before there is a murder, and given the title and the genre, this feels a little unusual. (I wasn’t sure whether I was wrong about this, but a rough straw poll of other readers suggested a death in the first 10% would be expected, with 20% at the outside. I’d love to know what other people think!) A lot of the preceding content is important/relevant, but I don’t think the narrative structure needed to be organised so strictly chronologically, and there were plenty of ways in which material could have been woven in elsewhere.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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