A Ghostwriter's Guide to Murder puts Melinda Mullet in the good company of Richard Osman, Leonie Swann, Robert Thorogood, and other authors of diverting and droll mysteries centered on amateur English sleuths for whom crime solving is a social event.
Maeve Gardner ghostwrites a mystery series on her houseboat, now moored in London's Regent's Canal. (Yes, she knows that it "looked like something out of a children's storybook.") One morning, her dog chews one of the dock's rubber bumpers and unearths packets of cash. Maeve puts the money back and goes to the police to report this finding, but when she returns with a detective, the cash is gone. The detective's trip isn't wasted, though: there's now a dead man with a bashed-in head floating in the canal. He turns out to be Maeve's cheating ex-boyfriend, whom she ditched four months earlier. The police don't need to be mystery-novel readers to deduce that Maeve had motive to kill him.
Maeve and her canal neighbors take turns with the novel's perspective as they join forces to prove her innocence. Also lending her his support is, in imagined form, PI Simon Hill, star of the series that Maeve ghostwrites ("Come on, Maeve, focus, Simon insisted"). Mullet, an American with British parents and author of the Whisky Business mystery series, captures a distinctly English sensibility as normally rule-abiding characters cautiously embrace misbehavior in order to help Maeve. Her Simon Hill series comprises many books; here's hoping A Ghostwriter's Guide to Murder launches a likewise enduring series. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer