Although her work falls into the broad category sometimes called the "British detective story" or the "British police procedural," and although her detective is undeniably British (in fact, a high-ranking inspector with Scotland Yard), Patricia Moyes's nineteen mystery novels have always been more popular in the United States than in Great Britain. Even into the 1970s and 1980s, when conventional wisdom held that readers had lost interest in formal detective stories, Moyes continued to sell well. As Anthony Boucher noted in his introduction to the omnibus volume Murder by 3's (1965), there are still readers ready to be taken "back in happy nostalgia to the prime vintage years of Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham in the 1930s."

Moyes's novels arise from a worldview that is ordered--some have said "cosy." Her plots have distinct beginnings, middles, and endings; authority figures are generally to be trusted; people commit murder because of...