In May I picked up An Easy Day for a Lady by Gillian Linscott (St. Martin's Press), from the mystery shelves at the local library. In July I picked up the softcover edition which was disguised as Widow's Peak (Warner Futura). In this second version, the hero, Xel Bray, was described on the back cover as a "suffragist sleuthess." Couldn't find "sleuthess" in the dictionary, and I hope it is not going to come into common usage.

Whatever the name, the story starts when Nel Bray goes mountain climbing in Chamonix to get over her anger at yet another failure by the British House of Commons to give women the vote. On her second day out she comes upon a party of French mountain guides who are trying to exhume a corpse from the glacier ice. Turns out it's the body of a fellow who went missing near the summit thirty years earlier. One of the guides lets Nell take a good look at the body because "He's probably English. Quite a lot of them are." She even gets to read some of a diary that is found with the body. Nell becomes involved further because she speaks French and the corpse's relatives don't.

All the makings of a good mystery, with evocative descriptions of the time and place. One of the characters informs us that the phrase "an easy day for a lady" was used in climbing circles to describe something that was too easy to be worth doing. Despite the insult, it makes a great tide.