Miss Beatrice Steele is obsessed with murder. Not committing murders, but solving the mysteries she reads about in the London newspapers.
Instead of perusing the society column like a proper young lady, Beatrice is fascinated by the adventures of Sir Huxley, the gentleman detective.

​Beatrice finds no satisfaction in the approved hobbies for young women in the village of Swampshire, but she had not considered that a genteel person might solve crimes as a hobby.
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Beatrice Steele was plump, with a cheerful gap in her front teeth and a white streak in her black curls, gained during a particularly competitive round of whist.

​Curious by nature, Beatrice must keep her obsession with murder a secret. Otherwise, according to The Lady’s Guide to Swampshire, decorum would force such a “fallen woman” to leave the village.
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Only a morally corrupt city would accept her, and once she made it to Paris, she would surely be robbed by a mime and left for dead.

​While the 25-year-old Beatrice is the eldest of three sisters, the Steele family expects Louisa (not Beatrice) to receive a marriage proposal from a wealthy bachelor at the annual ball.

Eventually, Beatrice would have to grow up and become a respectable woman for the sake of herself and her family. This would likely occur next week, she always assured herself. Or, possibly, the week after.

Instead of a most agreeable evening at the ball, the guests (including Inspector Vivek Drake, the disgraced half of Sir Huxley’s detective agency), are trapped inside with a killer, as a storm rages outside.

Beatrice teams up with Inspector Drake – with Miss Bolton as chaperone, of course – to interview the guests and examine the evidence, but the killer continues to elude them.
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“I shall instruct everyone to lock their doors,” Drake said. “And then…” He let out a sigh of frustration. “And then, I don’t know. We are no closer to determining the killer, and now they may kill again.”

​Beatrice knew he was frustrated, but she could not help feeling a slight thrill at the word “we.”

The quirks and twists in the story make for a fast and fun read. I won’t spoil it by telling you more.

I will tell you that as soon as I finished the book, I read it again.

​Not surprisingly, A Most Agreeable Murder has been named a Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. If you belong to a book club, there is a reader’s guide with discussion topics, recipes, and rules on how to play whist.
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While the manners-meets-murder mystery is Julia Seales’ first novel, the author is not a writing novice. With a bachelor’s in English from Vanderbilt University and a master’s in screenwriting from UCLA, she works as a screenwriter. Seales has adapted her novel for the screen.