A Medium for Murder — Mignon Warner

It was a picture-postcard English village, but like all such villages, it had its share of secrets, scandals and tragedies. The Player murder, however, was seldom discussed: in fact, the whole unpleasant affair was as good as forgotten - or would have been if a visitor to the village hadn't fed the local rumour mill with the startling information that the rather mysterious woman known as Mrs Edwina Charles had, ten years earlier, been the notorious clairvoyant, Madame Adele Herrmann, implicated in a sensational, unsolved murder case. And then the gossip really began. What had happened to the fabulous diamond necklace that Edwina Charles was reputed to have made away with after that earlier crime? What was her exact relationship to the eccentric Cyril Forbes, who was known as 'the Punch and Judy man'? Finding it necessary to solve not one but two murders out of the past, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent David Sayer hopes to silence the wagging tongues and restore peace and tranquillity to the village. There were too many coincidences, but he needs proof that Henrietta Player was the enigmatic medium's second homicidal success. And that's where Edwina Charles surprises him - in more ways than one. And without her crystal ball 'A Medium for Murder', the first of the Mrs Charles Murder Mysteries, which introduced the clairvoyant/private investigator, was published in the US under this title and in the UK as 'A Nice Way to Die'.