The Ellie and Clifford show continues….
I had read and enjoyed a couple of the early books in Verity Bright’s Lady Eleanor Swift series (see here and here), set in 1920s England, but somehow I hadn’t kept track of the series since then. Until, that is, the title of the latest book, Murder on the Nile, caught my eye because I’m a big Egyptophile. And I was amazed to discover that this is now the nineteenth (!!!) book in the series. But luckily, the things I liked best about the early books – the humor; Ellie’s pep-talks to herself; her bulldog, Gladstone; the interplay between Ellie and her butler, Clifford – are all still going strong.
Four years (in book time) have passed, and it seems that Lady Ellie is vacationing in Egypt in the style that only between-the-wars aristocratic Brits did, complete with butler, staff, and travel advice from the British Empire Exhibition in London. And now, having sent most of her staff ahead to their rental house in Bawaaba, she and Clifford are traveling up the Nile by boat to join them. Which sounds like a wonderfully relaxing thing to do, but that wouldn’t make a very good murder mystery – after all, to have a murder mystery, you need to have a murder! Sure enough, soon into their “cruise” on the grandly-named SS Cleopatra (which definitely doesn’t live up to its name), the body of a fellow passenger is found shot, in his locked cabin. And although Clifford urges Ellie not to get involved, it turns out that the dead man had left her a cryptic message…
Murder on the Nile is a light-hearted cozy that would make a perfect beach or airplane read, and I quite enjoyed it. But now I’m going to have to go read some of the earlier books, because I appear to have totally missed out on Ellie’s fiancé, the seemingly quite dashing Chief Inspector Seldon. And finally, my thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for the review copy.
Oh – and I still think that Clifford should have equal billing with Ellie as co-detective!
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