Murder at Midnight

Lily Adler, a Regency widow, travels to Hertfordshire in 1816 for a quiet Christmas with the family of her late husband. She hopes to repair her friendship with Captain Jack Hartley. Instead she arrives to find his sister Amelia tangled up in a neighborhood scandal.

After Mrs. Grantham's annual ball, a heavy snowstorm keeps the party at the house overnight. By morning a wealthy young guest has been shot dead in the poultry yard, and the snow leaves no one free to go.

Suspicion lands on Amelia at once. Among the snowbound guests, motives run through fraud, blackmail, theft and romantic jealousy. Lily is asked to look into the death quietly, before the truth is buried under the drifts.

This is the fourth book in the Lily Adler Mystery series. It works as a closed-circle puzzle in the manner of Agatha Christie, with a Regency house party in place of a country-house weekend. The tone is cozy and seasonal, with a crowd of suspects who all had reason to want the victim gone.