The Lady Who Was Mislaid

London, a wet March morning: Sir Malcolm Strathcarron arrives at a celebrated detective's door not grief-stricken but merely annoyed — his wife, he complains, has "removed herself from his house without permission." But the more the detective and his loyal companion look, the less it resembles a runaway wife and the more it resembles something colder: no boots, no maid, no luggage, and yet a journey "by arrangement" to somewhere far away. Following a bad-tempered Pekingese named Julius Caesar, a hollowed-out hiding place holding a silver whistle and a ferry ticket from Oban to Mull, a sharp-tongued hostess, a discreet secretary, and three words scrawled on a scrap of paper — "Ask the widow" — the trail leads north to the Scottish islands and a chilling phrase overheard in the house: "the island will cure her tongue." The Lady Who Was Mislaid is an original Golden Age-style mystery about marriage, power, and the old and terrible art of making an inconvenient woman disappear.