NO LOVE LOST

Lucky for actress/private eye Phyllida Moon (Death of a Stranger, 1999, etc.) that she’s so accomplished in disguise—“sleuthing in character,” as Jack Pusey, whom she married six months before he died of leukemia, called it—because her return to the Peter Piper Detective Agency in Seaminster will test her skills to the limit. Architect Hugh Jordan, skeptical about all the time his second wife Sandra spends with Joe Hardman, her real-estate partner, has engaged the agency to find out if they’re having an affair. At the same time, Sandra has approached Peter Piper to get to the bottom of Hugh’s after-hours relations with Marjorie Turnbull, his secretary. Both jobs, naturally, require Phyllida’s unique talents, and Peter sees no reason why she shouldn’t take them both, alternately singing alongside Hugh and Marjorie in the Seaminster Choral Society as dowdy contralto Pamela Spence and cultivating the Jordans—especially Hugh’s sullen daughter Susan—on the domestic front as American visitor Merle Parker, since there’s no chance Hugh will ever recognize the two new women in his life as the same person. In between bittersweet flashbacks to Phyllida’s brief idyll with Jack, there’ll be a couple of murders, an awkward convergence of both suspects and the law at the hotel where Phyllida is maintaining two characters, and a denouement that doesn’t bear close scrutiny. But the mystery never upstages the nonstop hosannas to Phyllida, whom one copper tells reverentially: “You should be in the force, Mrs. Parker.

Fans not equally infatuated with the admirable Phyllida need not apply.