The Bridegroom Who Mislaid Himself

London, spring 1930s: when Captain Hastings attends the stag dinner of Charles Chudley — charming, debt-prone, and hours away from marrying Cynthia Vale — and wakes the following morning with a strange dog on his blanket, the bride's watch in his coat pocket, and no memory of how either came to be there, the race begins to find a missing bridegroom before two o'clock, a church full of hats, and a family full of aunts can ask questions; what begins as a comedy of misplaced evenings becomes something darker as a veiled lady's note at the Marischal Rooms, a private enquiry office in Bloomsbury, and a corrupt solicitor waiting by the Thames water stairs reveal that Charles was not losing his nerve but trying to save his bride's family from blackmail — and that someone very deliberately planted the bride's glove and watch in Hastings's pocket as a reserve scandal to be deployed if needed; narrated throughout by Hastings with his customary mixture of courage, wrong theories, and accidental brilliance, and solved as much by a small golden-brown spaniel named Pip as by anyone who attended Oxford, The Bridegroom Who Mislaid Himself is an original Golden Age-style mystery about loyalty, false appearances, and the lengths to which a decent man will go to spare someone else's blushes.