False face

Bea Abbott runs her own successful employment agency and has just remarried her ex-husband, Piers, an artist who's recently been commissioned to paint a portrait of Karina, an aging, once-successful actress. The portrait is for the cover of Karina's memoir, which a young woman named Molly has been hired to ghost-write. Karina is a particularly demanding diva, but Piers is stunned when she accuses him of stealing her jewels. She's accused Molly of the same thing and has also alleged that Molly has taken the USB stick containing the only copy of Karina's memoir. The situation quickly deteriorates, with Karina's two thuggish sons threatening Bea, Piers, and Molly, who's turned to the couple for help. But is Molly quite the innocent she at first seemed? In short order, there's a disappearance, an assault, and a murder, all of which prompt Bea to dust off her amateur sleuthing skills. An entertaining British cozy featuring a feisty, quick-thinking heroine.

The owner of a domestic agency finds her own domestic bliss shattered when her husband agrees to paint the portrait of an aging screen star. Bea Abbot found so much to like in her first husband, Piers, that after the death of her second, she was willing to give the reformed philanderer another chance. Now Bea and Piers, a busy portrait painter, live together comfortably in a multistory, multipurpose home. Her agency occupies the spacious lower level, she and Piers live in the middle, and the upper story is available to Bea's ward, Bernice, when she isn't away at boarding school. Piers uses the cottage in the mews behind the house, where he lived before the remarriage, as his art studio. It's lucky that it's available, since Karina, subject of his latest portrait, has chucked him out of her house in Belgravia, claiming he stole a valuable piece of her jewelry while preserving her image for posterity. Piers isn't the first target of Karina's wrath. The actress, widely considered a "national treasure," fired her cook the day before and more recently accused her ghostwriter, Molly Malone, of theft. When Molly, intent on salvaging her reputation, flees to Bea's house, Bea realizes to her consternation not only that Abbot Agency had sent Molly--who had no experience as a writer--to help Karina write her memoir, but that Molly had listed Piers' studio as her mailing address. Alarm turns to terror when Molly's friend Jolene, another Abbot Agency employee, disappears, and Karina's adult sons break into Bea's home looking for the thumb drive containing Molly's version of the memoir. Layers of deceit push Bea to the brink as she fights a family with absolutely no scruples. A familiar tale of the good fighting off evil that holds few surprises. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.