Simon Brett

     I've always like Simon Brett's Mrs. Pargeter books. Mrs. Pargeter is definitely not your typical elderly Englishwoman detective; since she inherited from her late husband a fair amount of money, a strict moral code ("tell nothing but the truth, but not necessarily all of it"), a set of skeleton keys and a list of shady "business" contacts, there's not much that stands between Mrs. Pargeter and getting at the truth of the matter once she starts looking into it.  

In A Nice Class of Corpse, Mrs. Pargeter has moved into a residence hotel on the south coast of England.  Within days, two of the elderly residents have died under suspicious circumstances, and Mrs. Pargeter discovers that a substantial quantity of jewelry has gone missing.  

Grade:  A.

Having decided that the surviving residents of the hotel are looking backward to memories and not forward to life, Mrs. Pargeter buys a house in an up-scale suburban neighborhood, where she discovers that all her new neighbors have secrets they'd rather not have revealed, and that the woman from whom she bought the house is now Mrs., Presumed Dead.  The woman's husband is the logical suspect, but when he turns out to have an alibi, her suspicion turns to some of her new neighbors and their well hidden secrets.  Simon Brett indulges in some pretty savage social commentary on suburban life in 1980's Britain in this one.  

Grade:  A.

In Mrs. Pargeter's Package, she accompanies an old friend on a tour to the Greek island of Corfu. The friend dies; Mrs. Pargeter believes she was murdered and she herself becomes involved in an old Corfu family feud.  

Grade:  A.

The Body on the Beach is the beginning of a new series centered in the small town of Fethering on the south coast of England.  Carole Seddon finds a dead body of a middle aged man on the beach as she's walking her dog one morning, but by the time the police get around to investigating it, the body has disappeared.  Nettled by the police dismissal of her as a hysterical middle aged woman, Carole and her enigmatic new neighbor Jude undertake the investigation themselves.  

Grade:  B

I've read several of Brett's Charles Paris books, but apparently didn't keep any of them.  As I recall, Charles Paris is a struggling English actor with a fondness for alcohol and is one of the few ornaments of the British stage who did not make it into the cast of I, Claudius.