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Mrs. Jeffries #7-9
Mrs. Jeffries Takes Tea at Three
NOW IN ONE VOLUME—THREE VICTORIAN MYSTERIES FEATURING MRS. JEFFRIES
A DETECTIVE IN THE HOUSE
Everyone’s awed by Inspector Witherspoon’s Scotland Yard successes, but they don’t know about his secret weapon. Her name is Mrs. Jeffries, and she keeps house for the Inspector—and keeps him on his toes. No matter how messy the murder or how dirty the deed, her polished detection skills are up to the task. Because as she knows all too well, a crimesolver’s work is never done…
Mrs. Jeffries Plays the Cook
When a dead body turns up, Mrs. Jeffries winds up doing double-duty: cooking for the household—and trying to cook a killer’s goose…
Mrs. Jeffries and the Missing Alibi
It’s one of the most brazen murders anyone can remember—and Inspector Witherspoon has become the main suspect. Now it’s up to Mrs. Jeffries to clear her boss’s good name…
Mrs. Jeffries Stands Corrected
When a local publican is murdered, Inspector Witherspoon finally takes Mrs. Jeffries’s advice to trust his own instincts. But as he narrows down the suspects, Mrs. Jeffries and her staff must solve the case before he ruins his career—and theirs…
A DETECTIVE IN THE HOUSE
Everyone’s awed by Inspector Witherspoon’s Scotland Yard successes, but they don’t know about his secret weapon. Her name is Mrs. Jeffries, and she keeps house for the Inspector—and keeps him on his toes. No matter how messy the murder or how dirty the deed, her polished detection skills are up to the task. Because as she knows all too well, a crimesolver’s work is never done…
Mrs. Jeffries Plays the Cook
When a dead body turns up, Mrs. Jeffries winds up doing double-duty: cooking for the household—and trying to cook a killer’s goose…
Mrs. Jeffries and the Missing Alibi
It’s one of the most brazen murders anyone can remember—and Inspector Witherspoon has become the main suspect. Now it’s up to Mrs. Jeffries to clear her boss’s good name…
Mrs. Jeffries Stands Corrected
When a local publican is murdered, Inspector Witherspoon finally takes Mrs. Jeffries’s advice to trust his own instincts. But as he narrows down the suspects, Mrs. Jeffries and her staff must solve the case before he ruins his career—and theirs…
- GenresMystery
512 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2013
2 people are currently reading
208 people want to read
About the author
Emily Brightwell
68 books536 followersCheryl Lanham was born on 11 October 1948 in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, USA. Her family moved to Southern California in 1959 and she grew up in Pasadena. After graduating from California State University, she decided to work her way around the world and took off for England. She didn’t get much further because she met Richard James Arguile, the Englishman who became her husband, got married on May 1976, and had two children, Matthew and Amanda. While working in international shipping, she decided to pursue her dream and become a writer – which, of course, is the best job ever. She has written romance novels as Sarah Temple, and Young Adult novels as Cheryl Lanham. As Emily Brightwell, she is the author of the “Mrs. Jeffries” mysteries.
Cheryl Lanham Arguile returned to California, where she lives with her husband and a cranky old cat named Kiwi.
Cheryl Lanham Arguile returned to California, where she lives with her husband and a cranky old cat named Kiwi.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 20, 2013
4.5 stars.
The Mrs. Jeffries Victorian mystery series has become one of my favorite series. I'm so glad the older books in the series are being released again. "Mrs. Jeffries Takes Tea at Three" includes the 7th, 8th, and 9th books in the series, which I had not been able to find before now.
The overall premise of this series is Mrs. Jeffries and the rest of Scotland Yard Detective Gerald Witherspoon's staff help him solve his cases. The unique thing about the series is while the household and a few close friends work together to solve murders, the Inspector doesn't realize what they're doing. This may sound far-fetched, but it works and the result is a charming series with likeable characters that care about each other and making sure justice is served in the cases they help with.
The three books included within this volume are:
1.) "Mrs. Jeffries Plays the Cook" - This is my favorite of the three. It was an interesting mystery about the murder of a man with many enemies. It has equal parts of humor, touching scenes between the characters in the household, and the investigation.
2.) "Mrs. Jeffries and the Missing Alibi" - The household must work with Constable Barnes in this story when Witherspoon is removed from the case because he is a suspect. This was my least favorite of the three stories.
3.) "Mrs. Jeffries Stands Corrected" - The Inspector uses different methods to solve the murder and the solution of the case plays out in an unexpected way.
Although I didn't enjoy all of the stories equally, I'm happy anytime I can spend time with Mrs. Jeffries, Smythe, Betsy and the others so I highly recommend this for fans of the series or readers who enjoy a nice cozy, Victorian mystery with pleasant characters who will become friends.
The Mrs. Jeffries Victorian mystery series has become one of my favorite series. I'm so glad the older books in the series are being released again. "Mrs. Jeffries Takes Tea at Three" includes the 7th, 8th, and 9th books in the series, which I had not been able to find before now.
The overall premise of this series is Mrs. Jeffries and the rest of Scotland Yard Detective Gerald Witherspoon's staff help him solve his cases. The unique thing about the series is while the household and a few close friends work together to solve murders, the Inspector doesn't realize what they're doing. This may sound far-fetched, but it works and the result is a charming series with likeable characters that care about each other and making sure justice is served in the cases they help with.
The three books included within this volume are:
1.) "Mrs. Jeffries Plays the Cook" - This is my favorite of the three. It was an interesting mystery about the murder of a man with many enemies. It has equal parts of humor, touching scenes between the characters in the household, and the investigation.
2.) "Mrs. Jeffries and the Missing Alibi" - The household must work with Constable Barnes in this story when Witherspoon is removed from the case because he is a suspect. This was my least favorite of the three stories.
3.) "Mrs. Jeffries Stands Corrected" - The Inspector uses different methods to solve the murder and the solution of the case plays out in an unexpected way.
Although I didn't enjoy all of the stories equally, I'm happy anytime I can spend time with Mrs. Jeffries, Smythe, Betsy and the others so I highly recommend this for fans of the series or readers who enjoy a nice cozy, Victorian mystery with pleasant characters who will become friends.
December 13, 2015
This was borderline--I probably would have given it two and a half stars had that been an option. It's not that it's terribly bad; it's more that I kept comparing it with Agatha Christie. It is comparable to some of her material, but not her truly great ones. On the other hand, that's not really fair, given that this is one of Brightwell's relatively early books, and I've not seen the later ones.
Technically, this is a republished compilation of stories seven, eight, and nine in the Mrs. Jeffries series. The conceit is that Mrs. Jeffries is the housekeeper for a Scotland Yard inspector, and she and the household staff (along with a neighbor or two) secretly investigate his cases and feed him information in the form of asking questions he should be asking. It is set in Victorian London, when nearly every middle class home had at least one household servant, and Inspector Witherspoon as Jeffries, who runs the staff, a coachman who worked for his aunt and promised the elderly woman that he would stay and keep an eye on him but who secretly has his own small fortune from a separate inheritance, a footman who became part of the household as a boy, a cook who once worked in the household of a Lord, a young maid with a secret past in poverty, and a dog. They enjoy investigating murders, which is usually what the inspector covers because, they think largely thanks to them, he's so good at them.
The quality of the three books was fairly even. It was not as if one of them was truly outstanding or particularly bad. I would say she writes reliable comfortable mysteries with good character development and decent stories.
In the first of the three books in this volume, Mrs. Jeffries Plays the Cook, a particularly odious man is killed--and all of Brightwell's primary victims are entirely dislikable, creating a wide range of potential suspects--but before his murder our staff is already involved. It seems that a friend of a friend is being blackmailed, and the intermediate friend asks for their help, so they concoct a plan by which the coachman slips into the house and steals the evidence he holds against her. Work is being done on the third floor--painting and carpentry--so the house is wide open and easily accessed, but when the coachman reaches the office he finds the man sitting by his fireplace skewered to the chair by a sword taken from the wall. He takes the evidence anyway (foolish, really, since had he left it there would be nothing to connect it to the blackmail victim) but they immediately start investigating, with the knowledge that the person they have already helped has a good motive for it. Gradually they find that the man blackmailed or otherwise threatened quite a few people, and Mrs. Jeffries works out who must have done it. This may have been the best of the batch as far as mysteries go.
In the second, a night watchman admits a man who claims to be Inspector Witherspoon with a matter of life and death for one of three active partners in an insurance firm. The watchman leads him to the office and leaves, and later finds the partner dead--hit over the head then strangled with a school tie, a note pinned to his chest. Because Witherspoon's name was used, the Yard gives the case to another inspector who usually does robberies, and the staff worries that it will never be solved because the man is an idiot. Investigation finds again that this man was greatly disliked by everyone in the business, and by many in his family and social circle. My problem with this one really was that the note said "VENI", and I knew from that moment that someone was killing the three partners; but no one investigating the murder realized that even after the second partner was found killed the same way and wearing the word "VIDI" on his chest. It wasn't until the footman, who was handicapped in his investigations because of a broken leg, found the full saying while looking for information in the library that Mrs. Jeffries worked it out and got the inspector to the right place to save the third partner. Otherwise it was well done, and while I had a notion of who the murderer was and why, it still surprised me.
The third has the odd feature that the inspector decides not to talk about the case at all while home. Again the victim is an odious man, this time the owner of a very nice new pub. His wife has reason to kill him because of his infidelities; he is blackmailing his widowed sister-in-law and, specifically taunting the man who loves her; he has intentionally opened his new pub near one owned by his (surviving) brother to attempt to run him out of business; he is unkind to his staff and generally disliked. Despite this, he invites all these people, and more, to the opening of the pub on his birthday. They are running out of beer, and as he goes in the back to get more a fight breaks out in front of the pub, drawing everyone's attention outside, and someone stuns him with a blow to the head and then puts a knife in his back. As the staff investigates, they find a dozen viable suspects, but with the discovery of a second murder at the docks Witherspoon announces he is about to make an arrest, and the staff thinks he is about to ruin his career (since they haven't solved it yet), but he lays a trap and lures the thief into exposure. My problem with this one was that the main murder was so clearly carefully planned and executed but depended very greatly on the distraction of the fight out front that I thought it obviously had been staged as a distraction--but this possibility was barely mentioned and never investigated, despite the fact that someone commented on how unusual such fights were in that area (a few blocks from the Yard). While it is possible that the murderer got lucky on that point, that would have made the job much more difficult. It was, I thought, an important clue that no one pursued.
I had one other complaint overall. It is not uncommon for authors to write dialogue in the dialects of the characters, and Brightwell does that well enough. The problem is that she often carries the dialect into the narration when reporting on the actions of the same characters, and that's not the same thing. It was annoying, although eventually I managed to overlook it.
Overall, they're decent murder mysteries, but Dame Christie is not in danger of being surpassed.
Technically, this is a republished compilation of stories seven, eight, and nine in the Mrs. Jeffries series. The conceit is that Mrs. Jeffries is the housekeeper for a Scotland Yard inspector, and she and the household staff (along with a neighbor or two) secretly investigate his cases and feed him information in the form of asking questions he should be asking. It is set in Victorian London, when nearly every middle class home had at least one household servant, and Inspector Witherspoon as Jeffries, who runs the staff, a coachman who worked for his aunt and promised the elderly woman that he would stay and keep an eye on him but who secretly has his own small fortune from a separate inheritance, a footman who became part of the household as a boy, a cook who once worked in the household of a Lord, a young maid with a secret past in poverty, and a dog. They enjoy investigating murders, which is usually what the inspector covers because, they think largely thanks to them, he's so good at them.
The quality of the three books was fairly even. It was not as if one of them was truly outstanding or particularly bad. I would say she writes reliable comfortable mysteries with good character development and decent stories.
In the first of the three books in this volume, Mrs. Jeffries Plays the Cook, a particularly odious man is killed--and all of Brightwell's primary victims are entirely dislikable, creating a wide range of potential suspects--but before his murder our staff is already involved. It seems that a friend of a friend is being blackmailed, and the intermediate friend asks for their help, so they concoct a plan by which the coachman slips into the house and steals the evidence he holds against her. Work is being done on the third floor--painting and carpentry--so the house is wide open and easily accessed, but when the coachman reaches the office he finds the man sitting by his fireplace skewered to the chair by a sword taken from the wall. He takes the evidence anyway (foolish, really, since had he left it there would be nothing to connect it to the blackmail victim) but they immediately start investigating, with the knowledge that the person they have already helped has a good motive for it. Gradually they find that the man blackmailed or otherwise threatened quite a few people, and Mrs. Jeffries works out who must have done it. This may have been the best of the batch as far as mysteries go.
In the second, a night watchman admits a man who claims to be Inspector Witherspoon with a matter of life and death for one of three active partners in an insurance firm. The watchman leads him to the office and leaves, and later finds the partner dead--hit over the head then strangled with a school tie, a note pinned to his chest. Because Witherspoon's name was used, the Yard gives the case to another inspector who usually does robberies, and the staff worries that it will never be solved because the man is an idiot. Investigation finds again that this man was greatly disliked by everyone in the business, and by many in his family and social circle. My problem with this one really was that the note said "VENI", and I knew from that moment that someone was killing the three partners; but no one investigating the murder realized that even after the second partner was found killed the same way and wearing the word "VIDI" on his chest. It wasn't until the footman, who was handicapped in his investigations because of a broken leg, found the full saying while looking for information in the library that Mrs. Jeffries worked it out and got the inspector to the right place to save the third partner. Otherwise it was well done, and while I had a notion of who the murderer was and why, it still surprised me.
The third has the odd feature that the inspector decides not to talk about the case at all while home. Again the victim is an odious man, this time the owner of a very nice new pub. His wife has reason to kill him because of his infidelities; he is blackmailing his widowed sister-in-law and, specifically taunting the man who loves her; he has intentionally opened his new pub near one owned by his (surviving) brother to attempt to run him out of business; he is unkind to his staff and generally disliked. Despite this, he invites all these people, and more, to the opening of the pub on his birthday. They are running out of beer, and as he goes in the back to get more a fight breaks out in front of the pub, drawing everyone's attention outside, and someone stuns him with a blow to the head and then puts a knife in his back. As the staff investigates, they find a dozen viable suspects, but with the discovery of a second murder at the docks Witherspoon announces he is about to make an arrest, and the staff thinks he is about to ruin his career (since they haven't solved it yet), but he lays a trap and lures the thief into exposure. My problem with this one was that the main murder was so clearly carefully planned and executed but depended very greatly on the distraction of the fight out front that I thought it obviously had been staged as a distraction--but this possibility was barely mentioned and never investigated, despite the fact that someone commented on how unusual such fights were in that area (a few blocks from the Yard). While it is possible that the murderer got lucky on that point, that would have made the job much more difficult. It was, I thought, an important clue that no one pursued.
I had one other complaint overall. It is not uncommon for authors to write dialogue in the dialects of the characters, and Brightwell does that well enough. The problem is that she often carries the dialect into the narration when reporting on the actions of the same characters, and that's not the same thing. It was annoying, although eventually I managed to overlook it.
Overall, they're decent murder mysteries, but Dame Christie is not in danger of being surpassed.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 2, 2020
I do like the Mrs. Jeffries mysteries even if I haven't read them in the chronological order.
This three volume book was typical except for the last of the three , "Mrs. Jeffries Stands Corrected".
This is the first in the series, and perhaps the last, where the inspector solves the mystery entirely on his own - and quite cleverly.
This three volume book was typical except for the last of the three , "Mrs. Jeffries Stands Corrected".
This is the first in the series, and perhaps the last, where the inspector solves the mystery entirely on his own - and quite cleverly.
March 7, 2021
A ti-volume of Mrs. Jeffries mysteries:
MJ Plays the Cook
MJ and the Missing Alibi
MJ Stands Corrected
MJ Plays the Cook
MJ and the Missing Alibi
MJ Stands Corrected
July 12, 2021
One book with 3 different stories.
March 17, 2022
I FOUND THIS BOOK IN THE SERIES TO BE AS WELL WRITTEN AS THE OTHERS AND LOOK FORWARD TO READING THE NEXT BOOK AND THEN ALL OTHERS IN THE SERIES
January 22, 2024
A library find. January 2024.
I like this series. A three in one read.
Suspenseful!
Humorous!
Delightful!
Hard to put down read!
Don't miss!
I like this series. A three in one read.
Suspenseful!
Humorous!
Delightful!
Hard to put down read!
Don't miss!
May 14, 2013
I love this series the only problem is trying to find all the books in the series! I have been searching for books 9-16, the rest are offered on the nook.
February 3, 2015
Always fun. Still fun.
July 6, 2015
3 Mrs. Jefferies mysteries in one volume: "Mrs. Jefferies Plays the Cook", "Mrs. Jefferies and the Missing Alibi" and "Mrs. Jefferies Stands Corrected".
September 24, 2015
Cute little stories. Easy to read cozies and sometimes predictable, but the characters are fun.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews