Nancy Atherton's twenty-first cozy mystery in the beloved, Nationally Bestselling Aunt Dimity series.
While exploring the attic in her cottage near the small English village of Finch, Lori Shepherd makes an extraordinary discovery: a gleaming gold and garnet bracelet that had once belonged to Aunt Dimity. When Lori shows the garnet bracelet to Aunt Dimity, it awakens poignant memories of a doomed romance in Aunt Dimity’s youth in London after the War. Regretfully, Aunt Dimity asks Lori to do what she could not: return the bracelet to her unsuccessful suitor—setting Lori off on an adventure through London—and through history—to put a piece of Aunt Dimity’s past to rest.
In the meantime, a new family has moved to Finch. The villagers are thrilled because their new neighbors are avid metal detectorists. Metal detectors soon become all the rage in Finch and the villagers unearth a lot of rubbish (some of it quite embarrassing) before one of them stumbles upon a trinket that could hold the key to the origin of Aunt Dimity’s bracelet.
Is the bracelet a priceless and protected national treasure? Was Aunt Dimity’s lovesick suitor a common thief? If so, how will Lori break the news to Aunt Dimity? And what will she do with the bracelet? As Lori searches for answers, she discovers an unexpected link between the buried treasure in the village and the treasure buried in Aunt Dimity’s heart.
Watch out for Nancy Atherton's latest, Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom, coming in July 2018 from Viking!
This is one of those books I read because I've been reading the series from the start and a certain amount of loyalty is involved. As with a lot of series, it started off strong, but has levelled off over the years to become gentle stories that resemble morality tales.
Lori stumbles across an old piece of jewellery in her attic one day, resulting in a search for the man who gave it to Dimity, back after WWII, while in the village, the good people discover the joys and pitfalls of metal detecting.
Recent books in the series were getting on my nerves because Lori was gullible and tended to jump to the most ridiculous conclusions imaginable, but this time around she was far more competent and rational; there was still a level of anxiety, but it was much more believable.
Atherton has an incredible way of bringing wartime London to life and I think it is this more than anything that keeps me coming back every year for the next book.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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9 April, 2017:
Finished reading
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9 April, 2017:
Reviewed