Readers will say 'I do' to 'Mourning Wedding'

Carola Dunn has been prolific during the past decade with her Daisy Dalrymple mysteries. "A Mourning Wedding" is the 13th.

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The books have sprightly charm and concentrate on being good mysteries and, of late, have held back on slinging the slang. In the second book, set in 1923, somebody says, "Pip, pip, Daisy darling. I hope Occles Hall is worthy of your pen, but have a spiffing time anyway." The new book has almost no such extravagant period-setting.

Daisy and her best friend Lucy Fotheringay, both of the aristocracy, both flappers, became roommates in post-World War I London and worked, respectively, as freelance writer and photographer. Brainy Daisy figures out "who done it" in the murders she keeps running across.

By the time of "A Mourning Wedding," Daisy has married the Scotland Yard detective chief inspector she met in the first book, and she's pregnant. She goes to the country mansion of Lucy's family a few days before Lucy's lavish wedding to "Binkie," an aristocrat and successful financier who agrees that Lucy can continue her photography business after marriage.

Lucy has many relatives, but it hardly matters if the reader doesn't keep track of all of them.

First, Lady Eva, Lucy's great-aunt, is strangled. She loved to discover family members' guilty secrets and make a note of them. Everybody knew about it and everybody said she wasn't a blackmailer. In the investigation, those secrets will come out.

Then, Lucy's Uncle Aubrey is poisoned. Binkie comes along and, thinking it's a heart attack, tries to give artificial respiration. The inoffensive Aubrey's great interest was growing plants. He must have seen something that revealed Eva's murderer.

Third, Binkie is hit on the head and left for dead. Maybe Aubrey told him something.

Daisy's husband is asked to investigate. But by late in the book, he acknowledges that he's baffled.

It's a good old-fashioned mystery, with a huge cast of upper-crust characters, low motives and no motives. And Daisy comes up with a possibility that proves to be the real deal.