The trouble with Harriet

This wickedly funny English whodunit was a Mystery Guild Main Selection. Its spunky heroine, interior decorator Ellie Haskell, aspires to live a perfectly normal life with her husband and children in their lovely old house. But bizarre events and outlandish characters keep landing on her doorstep in Chitterton Fells, the charming little village by the sea. Just when Ellie means to escape her hectic life by taking a vacation in France, her long-lost father shows up with the ashes of his lady love in his suitcase. Ellie becomes suspicious as Daddy recounts the details of his storybook romance with Harriet, the platinum-blonde ideal of English womanhood he met in a German biergarten. You will relish Cannell's keen sense of the absurd as the plot thickens to include a visit from a kleptomaniac aunt, a village production called Murder Most Fowl, and missing relics of the local saint, Ethelwort. Barbara Rosenblat, with her impeccable comic timing and flair for characterization, is the perfect narrator for Cannell's uproarious series.