On the eve of World War II, Lady Lupin Hastings, the young, totally scatterbrained but kindly wife to Andrew Hastings, the vicar of Glanville, is off for a bit of a rest cure at a country hotel in Kent, owned and run by her old friend Diana Turner, while she recovers from a bout of influenza. However, no sooner has she arrived, when a series of petty thefts-and perhaps even an attempted murder?-requires that she assume her other persona: that of detective.
As usual, Lady Lupin gets everything wrong, yet somehow stumbles on the truth as she runs the hotel in Diana’s absence and tries to conceal her high-born origins from a socialist garageman she befriends.
Joan Coggin was born in 1898, went to school at Wycombe Abbey in the middle of WW1 and then moved to Eastbourne where she became a nurse. She then took up writing in in the 1930’s producing 10 books in all, most of them in the short period between 1944 and 1949. The Mystery at Orchard House (1946) was the second in the Lady Lupin series. The others were Who Killed the Curate?, Dancing with Death and Why Did She Die?