Lady Catherine Manning, wife of career British civil servant Sir David Manning, might have been satisfied with the demands of traveling with her husband all over the world. But she led another life writing crime fiction under the name Elizabeth Ironside. Her first book A Very Private Enterprise (Hodder & Stoughton, 1984) won the New Blood Dagger Award. Her third book grabbed my attention and held it. I first read Gold Dagger nominee Death in the Garden (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995; Felony & Mayhem, 2005) some 20 years ago and I still remember it vividly.

Unusually structured, the first section is brief. It simply explains that Diana Pollexfen was found not guilty of murdering her husband, MP George Pollexfen, in 1925. The second section describes the day of Pollexfen’s death and events leading up to it. Diana was a free spirit before she married and assumed a more conventional life, as befitting the wife of an MP. She invited her bohemian friends to the Pollexfen’s country house to celebrate her 30^th birthday. Her husband died in the midst of the festivities, imbibing a cocktail that turned out to be liberally spiked with the chemicals Diana used in her photography.

The transition to the third section is somewhat jarring, as it rushes the reader forward sixty years to Helena, Diana’s great-niece, also celebrating her 30^th birthday, alone in London. To take her mind off a problematic love affair, Helena begins sorting through Diana’s papers and finds her diary and learns about her aunt’s scandalous past for the first time. Reading the diary and newspaper accounts of the trial, Helena becomes determined to learn what really happened to George, whose murder was never solved. She and her cousins embark on a very cold trail, locating a contemporary witness along with letters, journals, legal documents, and similar papers, many of which are reproduced in the book.

The entire story is wonderfully organized and written, and the historical parts are impeccably realistic. Ironside knows how to do her research and create a convincing atmosphere. Aside from the more-than-competent mystery, the story demonstrates the epiphany of discovering that the people one only knows as staid and responsible older adults were once young and had tumultuous lives of their own. A fine historical mystery and character study. Recommended.