Police at the Funeral (Albert Campion #4), Margery Allingham. New York: Open Road Media, 2023 (Originally published in 1931).

Summary: A request to find a missing uncle turns into a multiple murder investigation in an unhappy Cambridge manor.

Campion has a meeting with the fiancee of an old friend in a secluded location called the Sanctuary when he encounters Inspector Stanislaus Oakes. Oakes is trying to elude someone who is following him. The young woman, Joyce Blount, has seen and knows him but won’t say who it is. Turns out she has a reason. Her uncle, Andrew Faraday, is missing. Her fiance, Marcus Featherstone, a friend of Campion, is Andrew’s solicitor. They want someone with Campion’s skills to help find him.

Campion arrives at Socrates Close, the family manor, to learn that Andrew has been found by two students–dead. Floating in the river, legs and hands bound, his head blown off with a bullet between the eyes. Inspector Oakes joins the investigation.

It turns out Andrew was a black sheep, a gambler, erratic and disliked by the family, including his brother William, his sister Julia, and Great Aunt Caroline, a formidable old woman who heads the household. Then, there is the man who had followed Oates, Cousin George Faraday, whereabouts unknown. Great Aunt Caroline immediately takes a liking to Campion and hires him to investigate the death.

Death soon becomes deaths. Aunt Julia dies the next morning after her morning tea. It’s poison. Suspicion, at least for Andrew’s death, falls on William. He was the last with Andrew, walking home from church with him, parting when Andrew went the long way home. But William also was late getting back and can’t account for the time due to amnesia, which he claims he has seen a doctor for. But his service revolver is missing, as is some as well as some cord from a window pull.

More bizarre things happen. William is wounded and faints from what looks like a knife wound. He recovers but Campion suspects more poison, just not enough. A huge barefoot footprint appears in a bed outside the house and a giant “B” appears on a window. Then George appears, has a conference with Caroline, and takes over the house. He has something on her, connected with Andrew’s death. The next morning, he’s dead–cyanide poisoning.

Both Oates and Campion keep searching for who could be responsible for all these deaths. Then the answer comes in an overnight fight between Campion and the barefoot stalker…

It’s fascinating to see the tie between Great Aunt Caroline and Campion. It seems to come down to discretion toward an old, if not particularly attractive family. Likewise with William under a cloud of suspicion. Under Campion’s eccentricity, there is a certain decency. But will it mislead him and endanger his own life in a house where everyone under the roof seems to be coming to an early death?