A Hearse on May-Day

222 pp. A Mrs. Bradley mystery in which a small English town is in need of skeletons. This story tells of the strange goings on in a village which lies somewhere midway between the New Forest and the shores of Wash. A young female relative of Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley breaks her journey to Norfolk at this village on the eve of May-Day and, through no fault of her own, becomes a party to some alarming ceremonies involving corpses and their skeletons and a form of folklore unhallowed by custom elsewhere. On this particular May-Day the squire of the village is to be buried. Rumour has it that he has been murdered, but whether by the celebrants of the macabre May-Day ceremonies as part of their ritual, or for some more mundane reason, it becomes the task of Dame Beatrice to disclose.