THE BEE’S KISS

There is nothing like a dead Dame.

While the well-to-do are hobnobbing at a birthday party in a private room at the Ritz, Dame Beatrice Jagow-Joliffe, one of the founding mothers of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens), tiptoes off to her room for an assignation and is murdered instead. Missing from the body are the prized family emeralds, even though DS William Armitage had been assigned to protect them from cat burglars and Constable Tilly Westhorpe discovered the bludgeoned body while it was still warm. Commander Joe Sandilands, just back from the subcontinent, is asked to look in, but to act as discreetly as you’d expect in 1926—and more discreetly than Dame Beatrice, who frolicked with either sex and may have joined one of her lovers, Petty Officer Donovan, in blackmailing sweet young Wrens into undermining certain political causes by threatening to reveal photographs of them en deshabillé. For whatever reason, the Wrens have been killing themselves at an alarming rate, and a woman who knows all about what’s going on is drowned in the Thames. Sandiland is told by the Admiralty and the Home Office to back off, but he persists, even turning his scrutiny on Armitage and ultimately on Westhorpe.

If not quite as atmospheric as Sandiland’s Indian excursions (Ragtime in Simla, 2003, etc.), intricately plotted, with clever red herrings and a dénouement that depends on a Lanvin dress.