1935. Dora’son the first train to London, having smuggled herself out of the house in the middle of the night to escape her impending marriage. But unluckily for her, Dora’s fiance is more persistent than most and follows.

As Dora alights at Paddington station, she is immediately forced to run from the loathsome Charles Silk-Butters. She ducks into the London Library to hide and it is there, surrounded by books, where she should feel most safe, that Dora Wildwood stumbles across her first dead body.

Having been thrown into the middle of a murder scene, it’s now impossible to walk away. Indeed, Dora’s certain she will prove an invaluable help to the gruff Detective Inspector Fox who swiftly arrives on the scene. For, as everyone knows, it’s the woman in the room who always sees more than anyone else: and no one more so than Dora herself.

‘D Is For Death‘ is an entertaining start to a new series of historical mysteries set in London in the 1930s. It features the wonderfully named Dora Wildwood, who is running away from her childhood home in Somerset to her godmother’s house in London to avoid the fiancé she no longer wants to marry.

For the first few chapters, I thought ‘D Is For Death‘ was a gentle fantasy designed to warm any bibliophile’s heart and keep them safe from encounters with unpleasant realities. It seemed that, in Dora Wildwood’s London, libraries are sanctuaries, nothing bad could ever happen in a bookshop and the gods of chance are on the side of the innocent, ensuring that Dora bumps into kind strangers who also love books and who are eager to help her when they see that she is out of her depth.

As I got to know Dora and as Dora saw some very bad things happen in a library, I realised that I had to reconsider Dora and the intent of the book.

I’d initially seen Dora as an innocent abroad, the kind that attracts trouble but doesn’t understand why, the kind of person that Graham Greene described as “a leper without a bell” because their innocence puts at risk everyone they come into contact with. After meeting Dora’s monstrous (but entirely believable) fiancé I understood both why she was running away and the resilience she’s demonstrated by surviving his behaviour and her father’s neglect.

I’d initially labelled ‘D Is For Death‘ as a cosy mystery to be consumed with no more thought than I’d spend on the cakes served for afternoon tea. I was wrong (and perhaps mislead by an author with a wicked sense of humour). As the story unfolded, I started to see that there was a layer beneath the cosy optimism of the story that acknowledged the unpleasant realities of poverty, misogyny and male violence that hadn’t been visible at first.

As Dora tried to solve the mystery of the murdered Head Librarian of the London Library. it became clear that she sees and remembers everything including all the sordid things in life and the misery it causes. Once I understood this, I realised that her optimism was not a default setting gifted by her innocence but rather a conscious choice about how she would deal with world.

The mystery at the heart of the novel is delightfully bookish, fits perfectly with the period and has enough twists to keep most Agatha Christie fans happy.

The only point where I felt the novel was weak was the handling of the big reveal. It was a dramatic reveal designed to entrap the guilty while allowing the alert reader to check whether they’d missed anything. Sadly, it went on for too long and went into too much detail for me. If Dora had had access to a PowerPoint presentation, I’m sure she’d have used one. I certainly felt like I’d sat through one.

Although I’d have liked the big reveal to have been delivered with more brio, I was still delightfully entertained by ‘D Is For Death‘ and by Dora Wildwood. I want to see what she does next. I’ll be back for the second book in the series.

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