Someone to Watch over Me (Grace and Favor Series #3) » (Reissue)

Jill Churchill has won the Agatha and Macavity Mystery Readers awards and was nominated for an Anthony Award for her bestselling Jane Jeffry series. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Grace and Favor mysteries and lives in the Midwest.

Lily Brewster and her brother Robert were living high on the hog in Manhattan until the Crash of '29 took the family fortune south. Abruptly penniless, they have taken up residence in their late great-uncle Horatio's upstate estate on the banks of the Hudson and are slowly getting used to small-town life. But while tearing down a dilapidated ice house on the property, Robert inadvertently stumbles upon a well-dressed, mummified human corpse, the obvious victim of foul play. And as Lily works hand-in-hand with the disarmingly attractive Chief of Police howard Walker on the local front and Robert pursues the Manhattan connection in search of their well-heeled John Doe's identity, a second dead body turns up to complicate an already complexly murderous matter — tying the Brewsters up in a knotty mess of deception and betrayal ... and leaving them dangerously exposed to the watchful eyes of a killer.

Publishers Weekly

After two paperback originals in this cozily charming series (Anything Goes and In the Still of the Night), Churchill makes an auspicious move to hardcover. In the long, hot summer of 1932, lovely Lily Brewster and her elegant brother, Robert, who've been left penniless by the 1929 crash, are living at a Hudson River estate, thanks to the generosity of their late Uncle Horatio. They must oversee their uncle's interests with the aid of lawyer Mr. Prinney and his hardworking wife, mindful that nothing will be officially theirs until they've occupied the place for 10 years. While Lily joins the Voorberg Ladies League to do her charitable best for the local village, her brother tends to the estate grounds. Robert discovers a long-dead body in an old icehouse, and no one knows who he was or how or when he was put there. Then a fresher body turns up, that of the out-of-work husband of one of Voorburg's hardest-working Ladies Leaguers. As Lily pursues one puzzle and Robert the other, Jack Summer, editor of the local paper, treks to Washington, D.C., to investigate a gathering of veterans seeking government relief from the Depression. Churchill neatly ties the disparate threads of the story together, all the while underscoring with subtle compassion the era's tragedies of daily life, major and minor. In contrast to the author's long-running Jane Jeffry series, which has become predictable, this one is still fresh and winning. (Nov. 13) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.