The Curious Incident at Claridge’s by R.T. Raichev

Major Payne gets drawn into a mystery when fellow officer Captain Jesty tells him about his clandestine observation of a beautiful woman switching the capsule contained in her aged husband's pill box which constitutes The Curious Incident at Claridge's. It turns out that Lady Tradescant has many reasons to wish her elderly husband dead. However, Sir Seymour Tradescant does not die of poison; he dies, two days later, in his bath at Mayholme Manor, a retirement home for gentlemen, where he is recovering from an infected toe. Major Payne and his mystery writer wife, Antonia Darcy suspect foul play but Lady Tradescant cannot be the killer because she was at Heathrow Airport getting ready to fly to the south of France. This mystery is the fifth in Raichev's Country House Crime series with each mystery set in a country house from a different era. Raichev has been compared with Agatha Christie in that his mysteries are sophisticated and cleverly plotted.