This was the best one yet in the series. ( )

While recuperating from bronchitis away from the air pollution in London, Daisy is invited to visit a friend living in the same town. Both she & Alec are invited for lunch, when a terrible stench is noted coming from the wine cellar....

The stench could only mean one thing... a dead body; that of an unidentified woman, not too decomposed, but enough to not be recognizable.

Meanwhile the woman who sold the house where the body was found has gone missing from her trip to St Tropez.

There are no lacking for suspects: the women who purchased & now live in the house, the schoolmaster who makes unwanted advances to women, the missing woman's boyfriend, the boyfriend's wife, and the missing woman's step-son.

Of course daisy is able to provide important information to the police that they have missed.... ( )

("Superfluous" is one of those words that serves as a reminder to me to be slightly more tolerant of other peoples' errors in grammar and spelling - I know there's only one "r" in it, but still I say "superflorous" and so irritate myself by trying to spell it that way.)

The time between WWI and WWII is so rich a mine field for authors writing female protagonists; by necessity, women are gaining more power, but also at risk of being left behind if they aren't able to adapt. At the beginning of this book Carola Dunn notes that after the First World War, Britain had about 2 million more women than men. Nice odds if you're a man, but dismal if you're a woman raised to do little more than find a husband and have a family.

Superfluous Women opens with Daisy convalescing in a country town just outside London, where an old school acquaintance has just bought and set up a house with two other women, all of whom have been labeled superfluous, or surplus women, by the media. When Daisy's husband Alec picks the lock to their well-sealed wine cellar for them as a favour, they discover a body.

This series and book are most definitely cozy, but the author does a creditable job infusing the changes and challenges of the time into the narration. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being fluffy and naive, Daisy Dalrymple would, I think, rate a 6 - maybe a 7, as there's no angst in these books to speak of.

The murder plotting was great - I should have seen who it was, but I didn't and I had fun watching it all come together.

I hope the author intends to keep Daisy and Alec going; the closer we get to the outbreak of WWII, the more curious I become as to where she's going to take them next. ( )

For once, it's Alec who stumbles upon a dead body instead of Daisy. Alec and Daisy are having lunch with Willie, an old friend of Daisy's, when Alec finds a body in the cellar of the cottage.

This is another cozy mystery by Carola Dunn filled with charming and likeable characters from Sally, the waitress at the inn, to Willie, one of the first female chartered accountants, to Inspector Underwood, the detective in charge of the case. The mystery was absorbing and I look forward to the further adventures of Daisy and Alec. ( )

A nice entry in the Daisy Dalrymple series. I like the ones with aristocratic/upper classes a little better than the ones with ordinary folk, which this one is but it's still a good mystery. The characters were fresh and the book moved along swiftly. I finished it in a day because I didn't want to stop reading. I wouldn't reread it though. ( )