Dear Little Corpses

1. What crime fiction lover could resist this title?

2. It’s one in a series of crime novels by Nicola Upson, in which Josephine Tey, a crime novelist of the 1940’s is the main character.

3. One of my favorite crime novels happens to be Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.

I was happily reminded of Nicola Upson’s novels recommending not-gruesome mysteries to neighbor and fellow reader Rebecca. I couldn’t remember the author’s name and when I went to the library site to find it, I learned there was a new one—Dear Little Corpses.

Oh, happy day!

I listened to it, which was delightful. There’s nothing like a British novel read by a British person!

The story was typical of the series: lots of charming and amusing detail about the Suffolk village where the imaginary Josephine Tey spends much of her time and about her relationships with its quirky inhabitants.

It's September, 1939, just after England declared war on Germany, and Dear Little Corpses begins with emotional scenes of London mums sending their little ones off to the country before the bombing begins.

Meanwhile, the villagers—Josephine and her lover Marta among them—are waiting for the buses to arrive with the children assigned to their village. Chaos ensues when there are considerably more children than they are prepared for. Though Josephine and Marta don’t really have room for children in their tiny cottage, they end up taking in Noah, a ten-year-old boy whose sister was taken by a family that refused to care for him, too.

As if that weren’t enough confusion, the weekend of the village fete is approaching and there’s much to be done before the onslaught of visitors arrive.

Then a little girl goes missing.

I won’t say more than that. It’s a mystery, after all. I will say, it’s wonderfully complicated. And the end is a surprise in the most satisfying way.

Though the book can be read and thoroughly enjoyed as a stand-alone, if you like series you might consider starting with the first and working your way through.

As for Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time, her detective Alan Grant is in the hospital with a broken leg, cranky and bored out of his mind. Grant is known for reading faces and, when a colleague brings him some prints from the National Portrait Gallery, he becomes fascinated by a face “full of conscience and integrity, that turns out to be Richard III, famed for having murdered his two young nephews to assume the throne.

Grant becomes obsessed, reading everything he can get his hands on, eventually working with a researcher, determined to find out what actually  happened.

Again, no spoiler!

But it’s a wonderful book, well worth reading.

“One of the best mysteries of all time,” according to the New York Times.