Death at Her Majesty's: 5

The Inspector has never invited her to the opera before.Wear a gown. Meet me at Her Majesty's Theatre. Seven o'clock. - R.Four hours before curtain. Clara Wetherly has time enough to alter her grandmother's green silk and not nearly enough time to decide whether this is an investigation or an invitation. Inspector Graham Redgrave has not been forthcoming. He never is.The case, when he finally tells her, is small. Jewellery vanishing from the upper-tier boxes during the interval. A garnet brooch. A silver bracelet. A pair of pearl earrings. Embarrassing enough to bring the theatre manager to Scotland Yard. Tidy enough that Graham could have brought a constable.He brought Clara.Then the Italian soprano finishes her final aria - and fifteen minutes later she is found in her dressing room, a white silk scarf still warm at her throat.The small case becomes the smaller case. In its place: a grieving Earl with a Paris address he will no longer use. A composer with cheap garden flowers and a song that will never reach the stage. An understudy who began rehearsing the dead woman's aria the morning after the murder. And, somewhere in the rookeries of Clerkenwell, a man from Milan who knew the soprano longer than any of them - and who is terrified of the police.At Hawthorne & Wetherly the lavender turns sharp. The rosemary jar shatters without a hand to break it. Marmalade hisses at a shadow no one else can see. And Genevieve turns The Gilded Leaf to a page Clara has never read.Clara Wetherly has solved murders before. She has never solved one that began with an invitation to the opera. Death at Her Majesty's is the fifth Tarot & Tea Leaves Mystery - a Victorian cozy with herbs, hauntings, and one orange cat who has been watching a man no one else can see.

Pages: 236, Paperback, Bicoastal Publications