Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Case of the Missing Morris Dancer by Cathy Ace

The Case of the Missing Morris Dancer  by Cathy Ace (Severn House, 2016) is the second in the series featuring the WISE Enquiries Agency, which operates from a ducal estate near Anwen-by-Wye, Wales. This agency comprises women investigators from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England, hence the acronym in its name.

The Duke of Chellingworth is getting married and everyone in the community has strong ideas about the activities that must surround that event to make it absolutely right. He is juggling the demands more or less successfully when the always-reliable musician and hereditary leader of the village Morris dancers disappears a week before the wedding along with all of the necessary paraphernalia. The disruption to the regional traditions and local sensibilities should the event proceed without the Morris dancers is too horrible to contemplate, and the ladies of the WISE agency are called in by the Dowager Duchess after the police find no evidence indicating foul play has occurred.  When the investigators learn the missing dancer planned a long vacation after the wedding that his friends didn’t know about and his van turns up in an out-of-the way lay-by, everyone is alarmed.

Each of the four investigators has a unique skill set that the group recognizes and deploys to advantage, making the overall agency greater than the sum of its parts. The folklore of Morris dancing and its origins are smoothly worked into the story line, which has a couple of surprises near the end.

A Welsh-English dictionary would have been helpful in reading this book, as the villagers often speak in their native Welsh and no translation is offered, although usually I could guess meaning from the context. There are two more books in this series after this one; the well-delineated characters and the picturesque setting lend themselves to a nice long run for the ladies of WISE.

·         Hardcover: 224 pages

·         Publisher: Severn House Publishers; First World Publication edition (February 1, 2016)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0727885545

·         ISBN-13: 978-0727885548

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal IT projects by day and reads mysteries at night.