In The Cruellest Month, the death of a librarian in Oxford's New Bodleian library stirs Sheila Malory, whom readers first met in Mrs. Malory Investigates, to probe the victim's past. Sheila's godson Tony, who works at the library, finds Ms. Richmond crushed under some collapsed bookshelves. Could Gwen have been a blackmailer? Could she have been murdered? Among the suspects-all once threatened by Gwen-are a girl Tony is in love with and a female don who has stolen an important artifact from an archeological dig. Sheila then reencounters Trinity don Professor Edward Fitzgerald, who had significantly influenced her life when she was an Oxford student; he also had unhappy ties to the dead woman. But it is the past as recounted in Gwen's diary during WW II that provides the key to the murder and forces Sheila to reexamine what she had considered a happy time in her life. Holt's civilized and tantalizing mystery explores both modern Oxford and rural wartime England.