A Forgotten Murder

A Forgotten Murder is the third book in Jude Deveraux's Medlar mystery series, the contemporary cozy mystery branch of her long career. Deveraux made her name in historical romance, with a catalogue of dozens of novels going back to the 1970s, and her shift into mystery later in her career has been a happy surprise for readers who liked her warm prose and her gift for character. The Medlar series is set in the Florida town of Lachlan and centers on three women, Sara Medlar, her niece Kate, and Kate's friend Jack, who keep stumbling into cases that the local police would rather they leave alone.

In this novel, Sara is invited to a country house in the English countryside where a group of old college friends are gathering. One of the original group disappeared without a trace decades earlier, and the host has decided this reunion is the time to figure out what really happened. As the weekend goes on, the secrets the friends have been keeping from each other start to surface, and Sara realizes the disappearance was almost certainly a murder.

Deveraux uses the country house mystery setup with affection. The genre conventions are all here. A finite cast of suspects, a setting that traps everyone in proximity, dinners where things are said that should not have been said, and a slow building case that turns on the kind of detail no investigator would have caught at the time. The pacing is leisurely by thriller standards but exactly right for cozy mystery readers, who are not in a hurry and want to spend time with the characters.

For fans of Deveraux's earlier mysteries A Willing Murder and A Justified Murder, this book continues the series satisfyingly. For new readers, the books work better in order, but A Forgotten Murder can be read on its own without major confusion.