Twice in a Blue Moon. - Hardcover

With 19 Henry Tibbett mysteries and still going strong, Moyes centers her latest plot around a thoroughly modern, self-sufficient young woman. Londoner Susan Gardiner unexpectedly inherits the Blue Moon, an old unused inn in Essex, from her great-uncle Sebastian. Although her distant cousin James suggests selling the place, Susan decides to turn the inn into a fashionable restaurant--despite the animosity of a rival inn owner and local rumors that her great-aunt Margaret's drowning in a nearby river 20 years earlier was actually murder. Three months after the restaurant's successful opening, a customer dies of mushroom poisoning, bringing Chief Superintendent Tibbett on the scene. After a second poisoning, Henry determines that someone is determined to close the Blue Moon and begins to delve into the facts and suppositions about Margaret's death in order to find out who and why. For die-hard fans, Moyes may not provide enough of Henry and his perceptive wife Emmy in this tightly woven cozy, but game Susan and the rest of the cast are entertaining company.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gardiner cousins James and Susan, who haven't kept up with each other, are reunited at the reading of Uncle Sebastian's will: James gets the London townhouse, worth a packet, and Susan, a Swiss-trained restauranteur, is left the Blue Moon, a derelict inn in Essex. She patches it up, begins a romance with James, declines his offer to buy it, and soon has a smash-hit gourmet dining establishment on her hands--until someone poisons one of her customers, and then another, and business falters. Enter Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett (Black Girl, White Girl, 1989, etc.) and his comfortably upholstered wife Emmy, plus sidekick Inspector Derek Reynolds, who chat up Susan's staff, a rival publican, and locals eager for a good chin-wag. Meanwhile, someone tinkers with Susan's car brakes, and she, perhaps rashly, marries James, then is almost drowned, while Henry and friends piece together a real- estate scheme and the dastards behind it. Echt cozy, and just the tonic for frazzled nerves: Moyes at her most companionable. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.