A MESSY MURDER

Ellen Curtis, the decluttering expert of SpaceWoman, is called on to tidy up the suspicious death of her latest client’s husband.

Now that their daughters, Chloe and Kirsty, are grown and gone, Theresa Carter thinks it’s high time that she and her husband downsize. Before they can leave Staddles, their spacious home outside the West Sussex village of Amberley, they’ll have to get rid of clothing, books, papers, tools, and the rest. What may need downsizing most urgently is Humphrey Carter’s ego. Though he’s no longer a journalist or a chat show host, the approach of his 80th birthday finds him still a freelance celebrity trailing clouds of glory, at least in his own skies. Humph’s self-infatuation has crashed to an end by the time Ellen finds him dead from an overdose of sleeping pills in his bottle of Famous Grouse—exactly the recipe he’d once prescribed for octogenarians in a column for the magazine Rant Ellen finds at his side. The circumstances scream suicide, but Theresa’s not so sure. She wants Ellen to look deeper into the case, and her recommendation of Ellen’s services to Niall Fitzpatrick, the longtime producer of Humph’s TV show whose wife died of cancer six months ago, seems designed specifically to help Ellen gather more evidence. But that won’t be easy, since Ellen’s also busy helping her friend Dodge figure out who’s stealing the wood he’s recovered from old houses and dealing with the drama provided by her own children, animator Ben and online fashion writer Jools, whose stint of working for SpaceWoman after a mysterious breakdown clearly won’t last forever.

Solid, unspectacular, and, despite its title, as economically told as if the story had been decluttered itself.