It's Agatha Christie by way of The Golden Girls in Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime, Leonie Swann's delightsome second Miss Sharp Investigates novel, translated from the German by Amy Bojang. The series, which began with The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, features a clutch of pensioners living in the English village of Duck End in a house owned by 80-something fellow resident Agnes Sharp, a retired policewoman whose default setting is low-simmering rage. Call the books crusty-cozy mysteries.
Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime finds the housemates ditching winter-blighted Duck End for the Eden, an isolated seaside luxury eco hotel in Cornwall. On their first day there, Agnes witnesses from a hotel terrace what appears to be a cliffside murder: first there were two people on the cliff, and then there was one. Soon the hotel becomes the setting for a murder spree, and although Agnes has been "irritated by the smooth efficiency of the Eden," this is going too far. She marshals her crime-solving housemates, whose limitations, including blindness and wheelchair dependence, neither daunt them nor preclude them from being suspected of murder.
The shrewdly engineered puzzle at the novel's center lodges inside a portrait of through-thick-and-thin friendship. Swann also offers rueful-humorous considerations of youthful folly (there's a withering parody of a popular blogger) and the realities of aging and mortality. Agnes, for one, has nothing against the dead: "After all, they didn't make any stupid comments, they were discreet and polite, albeit not always hygienic." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer