Take one grand house, stuff it with staff, and make it home to several generations. If they send their sons to Oxford and occasionally knock each other off, you’ve got a country-house mystery, that class of English crime fiction. But if the boys are at Yale, odds are that you’re reading a New York mansion mystery – a genre largely invented by Elizabeth Daly. 

Henry Gamadge, Daly’s gentleman-sleuth, does make occasional jaunts to the country, but now he’s back on the Upper East Side, receiving missives suggesting that all is not right at the elegant Fenway manse. He will, of course, unravel the mystery, but even more delightful than the solution is the peek at what the New York Times called “1940s New York at its most charming.”