The Wellington Bureau: A Quartermain Mystery

Cute

Lady Anna Quartermain is recently widowed. The young woman's deceased older husband, Andrew, and his young daughter, Emma, died in a car crash. Her playboy step-son, Toby plays a minor role.
After the funeral, Lady Anna enters a bank in the middle of a robbery by three inept crooks. She notices characteristics of the men, analyzes them, and eventually convinces two of the robbers to turn on their leader and surrender to the police surrounding the bank.
With that bit of detecting experience she opens an investigative office with two of the three robbers as her assistants.
The Wellington Bureau is a delightful bit of fluff which leans to romanticism. The final scene provides the reader with a clue as to Lady Anna's romantic entanglement in the following book. The story telling and general writing are good.

There are frequent editing errors that prevent the reader from appreciating the story fully. Extra words should have been edited out. The use of as for a, and inserting you for she are mindless errors that should have been caught. Also, a character's thoughts are expressed in italics, not as routine dialog set off with quotation marks. Scenes often run together without warning the reader of the change.

At one point Percy says, "Some of the roses must be very old. The roots are gnarled and woody." Without X-ray vision he couldn't see the roots; he was viewing the stems above ground.
The central characters are well developed and interesting.

Hopefully, the author will have a professional editor correct the many issues that drag this book's rating down to a low 3.0.

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