The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher

Florrie Butterfield has cherished her independence all her life, so losing a leg in her mid-80s was devastating. Forced to leave the cottage she loved, she found a residential community in Oxfordshire that accepted people in wheelchairs, Babbington Hall. But just as Florrie has settled in, things start to go wrong. When the story begins, she is mourning Arthur Potts, a friend who fell out a window and died four weeks earlier.

Everyone says it was an accident but Florrie isn’t convinced, especially because Arthur had just told her he’d uncovered something about someone there. Then Renata, Babbington’s manager, also suffers a mysterious accident, and Florrie’s suspicions increase. She enlists the newest resident, Stanhope Jones, to help her ask a few discreet questions. Can she find out what Arthur had discovered or why Renata was so depressed? Is there a murderer hidden at Babbington Hall? And what is the secret in Florrie’s past that causes her such melancholy?

My Impression: While elderly sleuths are not new – Miss Marple, for example, was 74 in At Bertram’s Hotel – they seem suddenly very trendy. It seems the success of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has resulted in several new mysteries featuring senior citizens. Elly Griffiths’ Harbinder Kaur series features a female detective who is both exasperated and fond of the eccentric partners in a detective agency, one of whom, Edwin, is eighty-four. The heroine of Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge, which I enjoyed in July, is a retiree who is scammed and decides to pursue the criminals because she has no other options.

Florrie is an unusual and appealing character. At 87, she is someone who tries to focus on the positive but suffered tragedies in her past. Trying to understand what happened to Arthur and Renata forces her to face some of the challenges she experienced, which is just as painful as the loss of these two friends. I was relieved when her ruminations were interrupted by Stanhope Jones:

He arrived at the residential home in the week before Christmas – entering the dining hall with such a benign, hopeful expression that, on seeing it, Florrie had lowered her spoon and imagined his schoolboy days, and how this man might have peered into a classroom one September morning with a cloth hat and satchel, his whole life ahead of him. She’d thought (as a mother might), I hope he makes friends. The Ellwoods had rushed to his side like doves – “Do sit with us!” and wouldn’t leave him. Velma Ridge had simpered, taken to wearing more rouge. But a few days later, they – Florrie and Stanhope Jones, just the two of them – had met by chance by the Christmas tree. Their first conversation had been about tinsel. Most of the discussions they’ve had since have been just as light and inconsequential, about the wind’s direction or a spillage to be careful of – the exception being that a few weeks ago she and Stanhope sat for several hours in the old orchard, musing on the best Shakespeare play and agreeing in the end that one couldn’t simply pick one, and that had been a splendid conversation, rich and unexpected. She had carried its loveliness for days.

Florrie needs a fellow investigator, given her mobility issues, but even more she needs a friend who listens to her and does not dismiss her worries as delusional, and Stanhope is both a good foil and very endearing. However, the most interesting thing about this book is the way the Florrie’s life story is woven into the narrative. Florrie’s hands are deeply scarred and only her childhood friend Pinky (now deceased) knows how this happened. Her 87 years have encompassed happy moments and adventure but also a lot of tragedy, and she has to face her past and to stop thinking about all the things she did wrong and focus on “all the small miracles and coincidences that, if they’d happened a moment sooner or later or not at all, would have meant a different Florrie and a different sort of life.”

This is book 25 for Carol’s Cloak and Dagger Challenge.  I think it was recommended to me by Publishers Weekly.  Union Square is part of Sterling, which is Barnes & Noble's proprietary publishing; this book was a good acquisition by them.

Publication: Union Square & Co., hardcover, 2024
Genre: Mystery
Setting: Present-day England
Source: Library