Lady Molly Returns to the Yard

In this pastiche, based on the original Lady Molly character created by Baroness Orczy, Scotland Yard's first fictional female detective has returned to work after two decades spent raising her family - and her first assignment takes her from the backstreets of London to a Tudor manor in Dorset, ostensibly for a house party of artists, writers and thinkers. In truth, she is there to watch guests just returned from the most troubled corners of 1930s Europe - some fresh from Stalin's Moscow, others shadowed by dealings in Berlin.Her devoted companion Mary Granard - narrator of this new account, as she was of Lady Molly's earliest cases - watches the house fill with old friendships, older resentments, and at least one marriage quietly falling apart. Croquet by day gives way to bitter arguments at night - and a body in the morning.As the local Sergeant arrives to help unravel means, motive and opportunity, Lady Molly must work out which of her fellow guests is capable of murder - and whether the danger she was sent to watch for has already arrived by another door entirely.Lady Molly Returns to the Yard is a brand-new full-length novel by Giles Keating, built on the character Baroness Orczy created for Lady Molly of Scotland Yard published in 1910 - and brought forward into the anxious, glittering world of the 1930s. It joins the Athelhampton Crime Series from Athelhampton House in Dorset.