Sheila Malory is ecstatic: her daughter-in-law is pregnant and she’ll soon become a grandmother! Her joy is tempered with sorrow, though, when an old friend, Leonora Staveley, dies of an e. coli infection, evidently due to drinking contaminated water. Leonora had been famous in her day, a pioneering female journalist who worked all over the world, but when she retired, she retreated into a tumbledown cottage on family property where she raised animals and lived simply. The water source that provided her drinking water was a pure country spring, but somehow something had contaminated it, and Mrs. Malory just can’t quite seem to let the death go as an accident….This is the twelfth book in the Mrs. Malory series, and like the others before it, I don’t believe it is necessary to have read all the previous books to enjoy this one. There are certainly characters that recur in each book, including Mrs. Malory’s family and best friends, but each book seems to introduce more new characters who are, almost without exception, also old friends or neighbours of our heroine. Usually the victim is someone quite unlikable, although that is not true of this entry, and Mrs. Malory’s ability to gather information without seeming to do more than gossip with villagers, along with her intuitive leaps, stand her in good stead in this cozy novel too; recommended. ( )

Author was friend and biographer of Barbara Pym. Her protagonist has some things in common with Pym's characters and solves mysteries in a cozy English village while cutting up fish for her cat, volunteering for every village good cause, and writing literary biographies. ( )

Sheila Malory is the fiftyish (or I suppose, by now sixtyish) amateur sleuth at the center of Hazel Holt's "Mrs. Malory" series of mysteries. Sheila is a widow who lives in the fictional English seaside village of Taviscombe. She's sensible and witty and erudite and self-deprecating, and she makes her own marmalade and scones. She has a grown son (who goes from university to law practice during the course of the series), a dog named Tris, and a cat named Foss. She is "deeply involved in local activities," always helping plan the annual Christmas Fayre, or rounding up jumble for a sale to benefit Help the Aged. She's also a writer of "the occasional volume of literary criticism – mostly about the more obscure Victorian novelists." And in her spare time (!) she solves local murder mysteries.

The Mrs. Malory books are "cozy" mysteries, so there's very little violence or overt nastiness. The deaths take place "offstage," and most don't even seem like murders at first – the victims are usually (but not always) elderly or ill, so that their deaths don't strike anyone as too surprising or suspicious. In Mrs. Malory and Death By Water (issued as Leonora in the UK), Sheila's dear friend Leonora Staveley, a legendary journalist and foreign correspondent now in her eighties, is found dead from drinking contaminated water. And although the cause of death seems surprising, Sheila at first accepts it as not unlikely – Leonora lived alone in an out-of-the-way country cottage, with a large assortment of domestic and farm animals roaming around the place. So a contaminated water supply doesn't seem out of the question.

But in her will, Leonora has left her voluminous library to Sheila. And once Sheila starts sorting through all the books and papers, she begins to see the death as suspicious – especially after a few questions arise about some of Leonora's other bequests. And then there's the fact that Leonora's brother Vernon was anxious to acquire her cottage so he could use the land for a real estate scheme he'd been working on. Sheila also finds out about a quarrel Leonora had with her neighbors, over the placement of a boundary wall between their properties. And then strangers begin to emerge from Leonora's past (well, don't they always?), leading Sheila to realize that her old friend may have had an even more adventurous life than anyone had imagined. After that, Sheila of course suspects foul play, and she's off and running. Well, not running – she's too dignified for that.

I'd definitely recommend the Mrs. Malory books to anyone who enjoys a good cozy, or who loves the writing of Barbara Pym. I suppose it's not surprising that I should think of Pym and Hazel Holt together – they were friends and co-workers for many years at London's International African Institute, and Holt later became Pym's literary executor and biographer. These days there are a lot of "Pymish" mysteries around, but in my opinion the Mrs. Malory series is far and away the best of the lot. ( )