Dying in the Wool by Frances Brody was first published in 2009. I was keen to read it as I had really enjoyed Murder in the Afternoon which is the third book in her Kate Shackleton series, yes that’s me reading books out of order – again. The setting is Yorkshire in the 1920s.

Kate Shackleton is a 31 year old First World War widow, but she is in denial about her husband’s fate and is still expecting/hoping to find him alive – somewhere. In trying to track her husband down she has become known as a bit of a sleuth. She receives a letter from Tabitha, an old friend from the days when they were both VADs in the war. Tabitha is about to get married and she wants her father to be at her wedding, but he has been missing for years, Kate decides to take on the case.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the third one in the series so I’m hoping that the series just started off a bit weak and has improved with subsequent books.

There were a few factual mistakes in it which annoyed me, they really should have been picked up by an editor.

There were a lot of mentions of demob suits, and they were a World War II thing. Men being demobbed from the armed services after the war were given a choice of a suit to help them get back into civilian life after six years in uniform. According to my father they were all ghastly but in any case, they didn’t exist for the First World War.

The other thing which annoyed me was when Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife Jean appear and Sir Arthur’s wife Jean is called Lady Jean and Lady Doyle, several times, even within the same paragraph. At first I was thinking – is there a Lady Jean as well as a Lady Doyle, but no, it’s just that the author seems to think that the two titles are interchangeable, which of course they aren’t and as Jean Doyle was not born a ‘Lady’ but got her title as a result of her husband being knighted, then she was definitely Lady Doyle.

I will read the others in the series though.