The colonel, an old soldier living alone with his cat in a small village, is summoned by his wife's friend who desperately needs help. A corpse has been found buried in the barn she is renovating. She is quite willing to cover it up and leave it but the colonel is more principled and calls the police. There is not much to the story, and little in the way of investigation. ( )

I read the first two books a couple of years ago and thought I'd see how the little village of Frog's End was doing. The character of the Colonel is the driving force behind these books. He breathes to solve murders and his little village has more than their share. Much of his sucess is that he draws the people to him and makes them comfortable enough to share everything they know about everybody and anything that is happening. I do have to admit that other than the Colonel, the majority of the characters are pretty unlikable. While he's solving the murders he's also worrying constantly about things at his home like his garden and his cat, Thursday. These stories thus far have been lightweight. I'm used to having more suspense in my mysteries and there was not a lot of that in these books. It's more about the characters, and of course the one that is dead. The ending was a surprise. ( )

From what I can see on Fantastic Fiction, Margaret Mayhew has been writing for over three decades, but she has generally produced books set in the second world war, gentle romances set against the the horrors of war. For the first 10 years of writing she seems to have produced Regency romances.

The Colonel who is the central character of DRY BONES emerged in 1999 in OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE. His wife Laura has recently died and he has been forced into retirement, and gone to live in the village of Frog's End. I haven't read this one, but I assume it is the first of her "village mystery" series. In DRY BONES, there is reference to another title, THREE SILENT THINGS in which an ageing actress was electrocuted in her bath on New Year's Eve. An interesting feature of the plot of DRY BONES is that in "real time" the Colonel has not moved on much: his wife Laura is still quite recently dead.

It is hardly surprising that someone with 22 novels under her belt, so to speak, has produced a passably readable cozy. Without revealing too much of the plot, the dry bones from which the book takes its title are discovered under the floor of a barn that Cornelia, his wife's friend, is having renovated, and they are not nearly as old as the locals hoped. There are plenty of suspects who might have put them there.

In short, a pretty easy, undemanding read with an interesting plot. ( )