"Murder at Afternoon Tea" by Rosie Hunt

"Sun streamed through the open French doors of Wolborne House's old-fashioned yet elegant drawing room. …  At its centre was a tea table, generously laden with all manner of sweets. There were buttery scones with thick clotted cream and brilliant red strawberry jam, dark slices of fruit cake with cherries shining like jewels, and crumbly golden shortbread cut into petticoat tails and dusted with sparkling sugar granules."

— From Murder at Afternoon Tea by Rosie Hunt

This fun cozy mystery is set in 1921, and Lady Felicity Quick, a society-page journalist (like I once was), is longing to write meatier stories for the Western Daily News, the newspaper whose editor is her brother, Lord Jasper Quick. Lady Felicity ("Cici" to friends and family) agrees to interview an old chum who is now an up-and-coming actress and theatre director, Olivia Heygate-Harper. Cici visits Olivia's home and is welcomed to afternoon tea, but before the visit ends, Olivia's battle-ax of a mother, Lady Dora Heygate-Harper, chokes on a petticoat tail and appears to recover but is later found deceased in her bedroom. 

As curious as any good journalist should be, Cici whips out pencil and paper and makes notes on all she observes as she tries to determine whether Lady Dora's death was indeed an accident. Olivia's older sister and brother-in-law inherit the estate, so they had reason to wish for Lady Dora's demise. The housekeeper seems a little sketchy, and so does the fumbling maid, Gwen. Hunt is great at casting doubt on each of her characters, only to move along and direct our attention to someone else who seems equally suspicious.

Those of us who watched Downton Abbey can't help being reminded of Edith and her newspaper career, a comparison Hunt would seem to welcome. With the country house lifestyle still relatively fresh in our minds, we find it easy to slip into this world of English estates and the upstairs-downstairs characters who inhabit them.

I liked the fact that this book was a short read, and its tasteful but unexpected conclusion was one I found clever. If you would like to read it, too, you won't find it on Amazon (it's considered "Book 0" in the series, what some call a "reader magnet" to get you hooked), but you can download it for free simply by signing up for the author's newsletter here: https://BookHip.com/NFQLZAD.