This third in the Pennyfoot Hotel series is a comfortable little cozy. I find that I enjoy the characters in this book (especially the serving staff), and the mysteries are usually a little tricky puzzle like this one. Cecily is faced with having her hotel connected to a ring of jewel thieves and to a murder, so she must set out to solve the murder on her own with the help of the faithful Baxter. It all starts with the wrong body in a casket at a funeral. These books are set in Badger's End during the English Edwardian era, so that also makes them interesting. These little stories are a lot of fun. ( )

Things just get worse as Kingsbury struggles to give her charming little hotel and community a voice. Wait, charming hotel, well we aren't learning much more about the hotel, well not much more that is believable. Part of the plot revolves around a secret passageway that the previous owner had built that traipses through the Library down to the cellars and out to the beach. The man was an Earl (A pretty exalted titled noble) and he had to worry about privacy at this big mansion of his?

Some of Kingsbury's choices don't work. Why do the lower classes have a cockney's film dialect rather than what we have heard so often in other portrayals of the time? Let us look back to the beginning. The local Doctor has died. A minor character who has helped out on the previous two mysteries. But the constable shows up during his funeral service, it is not the Doctors body in the casket.

That in itself would be a fine plot device, but it becomes weak later on as the motive to exchange the body seems weak. Further that motive is compounded with a reason for the hotel to be at risk, which makes our heroine want to sleuth. That is an excuse, she has successfully sleuthed twice before.

We also suffer from a lack of red herrings, and while this book does not suffer from long bouts of exposition, there is too much dialogue that has no bearing on the mystery, but a great deal on a side story of a wedding taking place. it shows a lack of focus, and a lack of craftsmanship.

In all the book suffers from bad plotting, and a poor immersion of Edwardian england. I have no feel for the time from what we have here. A series I am becoming disenchanted with and beginning to wish I had not purchased. ( )