I love being given the opportunity to update our school library which is a unique space for both senior students and staff to access high quality literature. This is definitely a must-buy. It kept me absolutely gripped from cover to cover and is exactly the kind of read that just flies off the shelves. It has exactly the right combination of credible characters and a compelling plot thatI just could not put down. This is a great read that I couldn't stop thinking about and it made for a hugely satisfying read. I'm definitely going to order a copy and think it will immediately become a popular addition to our fiction shelves. 10/10 would absolutely recommend.

This is the tenth book featuring Josephine Tey, but the first one that I have read.
It’s 1939, and Josephine is living in the village of Polstead, with her partner Marta. War is about to be declared and children are being evacuated from cities to the countryside in a bid to keep them safe. Polstead expects to receive one busload of children but when two buses arrive, there is chaos and confusion. How will they find room for all of the new arrivals? Josephine and Marta hadn’t planned on taking in an evacuee but they do and eventually, everyone is found a home.
The following day at the village fete it becomes clear that a little local girl has disappeared. No-one realised she was missing as both mother and grandmother thought she was with the other. She has been gone for 24 hours. Luckily Josephine’s friend, DI Archie Penrose is at the fete and while it’s not his jurisdiction, he takes the initial lead on the hunt for the little girl.
No spoilers here so I will leave it at that but what I will say is that what follows is the stuff of every parent’s nightmare.
Beautifully written, the story is full of drama and tension with well-rounded, believable characters.
The one thing that struck me about the book, other than my child going missing is more than I even want to think about, is what those poor parents in 1939 must have gone through. They tied a luggage label to their child with their name on it and waved goodbye to them. They gave the safety of their most precious thing over to the care of strangers. Their fears and their anguish are right here within the pages of this book.
Many thanks to the auther, publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My review:⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dear Little Corpses by Nicola Upson is set in World War II, and is book 10 in the Josephine Tey series.  I didn't find that I was missing a lot even though I haven't read the previous books in the series.

This is a cosy crime book, and I found this to be very evocative of the time.  It also has main characters who are LGBTQ+ and living together in a village and hiding their relationship.

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to Faber and Faber.

Synopsis: During the evacuation of children from London, when the village is temporarily overrun with strangers, a little girl goes missing. With worries and suspicion gripping the locals, mystery writer Josephine Tey helps her friend Archie, a London detective, on the case.

▪ Small village. Old secrets. You know how it goes: an investigation makes neighbour suspect neighbours and inevitably uncovers buried secrets (sometimes literally). There is a cast of eccentric villagers, which gives this the touch of a Golden Age-era mystery.

▪ Pervasive dread. I have trouble dealing with bad things happening to children, and with the synopsis I should have expected it, but the tone was a bit more heavy that I expected. Just be aware of this of you’re looking for light entertainment, you might want to wait until you’re in the mood for something a touch darker.

▪ 10th in a series. I don’t think you need to have read the previous books to understand, but it probably helps. For example, I suspected Josephine and Marta were lovers, but it took a really long time for that to be confirmed. I assume readers of the previous books would have known this.

Overall, the mystery is really good. It’s more intricate than it looks at first glance, but in the end I feel like the denouement left me with only a vague impression of what had actually happened. I recommend reading the other books first to avoid being annoyed at some missing character background.

If you haven't yet discovered Nicola Upson's excellent historical crime series, here's your chance.

This novel takes place in the early days of World War Two as war is declared and children evacuated en masse to the country. The Suffolk village in which Josephine Tey is living ends up with a lot more evacuees than planned, forcing those who didn't want to take children to open their homes - the scene in the village hall where the evacuees are being homed made me really think of 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks' in all the best ways! When a child goes missing, Tey and the villagers start asking questions and pointing fingers...

As with all of the novels, Upson's sense of time and place is impeccable. In this case, wartime London and Suffolk are evoked beautifully - and I was particularly pleased that part of the action centres on the Tiptree jam factory (where I had the pleasure of a summer job back when I was a student - many days de-stoning plums!) There is a palpable sense of the unease in Tey's Suffolk home, a cosy village, when it turns out that there is danger within the complacent, small, close-knit community. There is also a real sense of the panic and chaos of London as children are evacuated - along with the grief and worry of those left behind in the city.

I love that Upson's detective is a real life crime writer, Josephine Tey. Her status as author takes more of a back seat in this novel, but she is an interesting and rounded character - there's good continuity and credibility in the way that she acts, giving the sense that Upson really 'knows' her heroine well.

The action of this novel is - as always - cleverly plotted, but the real strength of Upson's novels is the emotional depth. Given the emotive topic - child evacuation and also abduction - it goes without saying that there is a profound sense of tragedy running through the novel. This is obviously strongest around the missing child, but the grief around the mass evacuation is also pitched perfectly - the idea of putting small children on trains out of the capital, not knowing where they were going or to whom, is heartbreaking and Upson communicates this with authenticity and sensitivity.

This is a series that I've followed from the start ('An Expert in Murder') - which I'd recommend really so that you get the full back story of Josephine's relationship with Marta and her friendship with Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose. This is book 10 so you have some really enjoyable catching up to do! However, the mysteries would all work as standalones so don't be put off if you haven't read previous books.

Thanks to NetGalley for the book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this without having read previous outings in the series. A rich detective story in an interesting setting very well written

This new murder mystery by Nicola Upson featuring Josephine Tey and Co is dark and gloomy just as the times (the beginning of WWII).
The murder mystery in this installment is made all the more daunting, haunting, and even hopeless by the events and characters surrounding it. There are children's abductions and murders, people showing their true colors (not the good ones), long time horrible secrets being uncovered.
WWII is accumulating its soul=destrying power and powers in London decided to evacuate children to the country. Readers get to see a version of this eventuality that shows many grades and many colors to peoples' characters, souls, and nature. It is not all flags and ribbons, scones, and lemonade. And on top of all this horror and sadness, we get to follow Josephine Tey and her friend Police Detective while they uncover murders and so much more that has been left hidden and buried...
I can't say I enjoyed this book but I respected the author and her story and am grateful to Nicola Upson and her series.

Dear Little Corpses is the tenth book in Nicola Upson’s atmospheric series featuring Golden Age crime author Josephine Tey flexing her little grey cells as an amateur sleuth. While the nearest the real-life Josephine seemingly came to fighting crime was retrospectively investigating the role of Richard III in the infamous disappearance of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, as chronicled in The Daughter of Time, the fictional Josephine stumbles across a death at nearly every turn, which is definitely in keeping with the murder rate portrayed in her and other Golden Age novels.

As her latest criminological adventure begins, it’s 31st August 1939 and, while the rest of the country prepares for war, Josephine is concentrating on spending a few quiet days at her cottage in the Suffolk village of Polstead with lover Marta Fox before the actress has to depart for Hollywood and the opportunity to work on a film with Alfred Hitchcock. She’s not able to fully escape the chaos caused by the upcoming conflict, however, as she and Marta are roped into helping Hilary Lampton, the local vicar’s wife, organise the horde of children who have been evacuated from London to the apparent safety of the countryside.

The children’s arrival in the village is fraught and, as far more turn up than were expected, Josephine and Marta agree to temporarily house a young boy named Noah, while his five-year-old sister Betty is sent to stay with the eccentric Herron siblings—elderly sisters Lillian and Florrie and their cosseted brother Edmund—at the stately Black Bryony. Although the majority of the villagers sincerely want to help the evacuees, some are definitely after cheap labour to work on their farms, whereas others have something of a shopping list when it comes to who they are willing to accept into their homes. Upson does a sterling job of elucidating the trauma of the experience for both the children and the parents they have to leave behind.

As the children begin to settle into their temporary homes, attention in Polstead turns to the annual village fete, which is another thing that Josephine finds herself coerced into helping with—in this case, she’s to be responsible for judging the various baking and prize vegetable competitions held during the fete. She has to pass up that honour though when word gets around that a local girl, five-year-old Annie Ridley, has gone missing, having last been seen sometime the preceding evening heading to her grandmother’s house due to her parents being preoccupied with making arrangements for their evacuees. A cloud of deep concern and suspicion quickly descends and the villagers break away from the fete to search for the missing girl.

Fortuitously, Josephine’s pet policeman, DCI Archie Penrose, is taking a break from solving crimes in the capital and visiting Polstead for the day with his new lady friend and her children. Theirs is an extremely complicated relationship, what with Archie being responsible for the arrest and, therefore, the execution of her first husband, so it’s good to see them out and about for the day like a regular family, even if the outing is interrupted by news of the disappearance. Due to his considerable experience with Scotland Yard, Archie takes charge of the investigation for the local police and begins to make enquiries into both Annie’s possible location and the whereabouts of the village’s more dodgy characters.

Of course, despite her best intentions, Josephine also gets drawn into the case and this time round, she gets a little help from another doyen of crime fiction: Margery Allingham, author of the Albert Campion novels, who lives in a village near Polstead and was accidently also invited to judge at the fete. There’s a wonderful bit of banter back and forth between the two as to who will be the first to feature a village fete in one of their novels—A Fete Worse Than Death, perhaps?—and some amusing shade gets thrown at fellow local author Dorothy L. Sayers too. If only Agatha Christie had turned up as well, there would have been a true Golden Age crime fiction dream team in Polstead and the case would have been over before it even began.

As it happens, Margery Allingham has far more local knowledge than Josephine, including a familiarity with the peculiar Herron family, which proves helpful in cracking the mystery behind the mystery of Annie’s disappearance. Aside from being in the right place at the right time on one key occasion, Josephine actually acts as more of an observer during the events of Dear Little Corpses, rather than as a supersleuth hot on the trail of the villain. This sense of detachment highlights her outsider status, but also reflects the otherworldly and surreal atmosphere that often descends when a crime involving a crime occurs. She does still get the chance to demonstrate her astounding understanding of human nature and her compulsion to fight for the underdog though.

In Dear Little Corpses, Upson blends fact with fiction in a masterful way, crafting a troubling plot that envelops the characters—both those based on real people and those who are wholly fictional—in a darkness that somehow manages to exceed that associated with the forthcoming war. It all makes for a powerful story that delivers an emotional punch to the gut on several occasions as Josephine, Marta and Archie attempt to find the truth as the serene façade of Polstead crumbles and the wider world starts to disintegrate.

Interesting period thriller set at the beginning of the Second World War and involving evacuees. I found it hard to put this book down and there was a lot of suspense and an unexpected ending.

I had no idea this was a series but it read well as a stand alone. A really interesting background of a village taking in evacuee children from London as the war starts. A child goes missing. A really clever story with a good twist. I really enjoyed this.

War has been declared, and children are being evacuated to country villages all over Britain to keep them safe from the expected bombing to come. But what if the quaint village is not as safe as it looks on the surface? A child goes missing amongst the chaos and a chain of consequence is set in motion. This is a great mystery story featuring 2 queens of the golden age of detective fiction- Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham. Beginning with a well written, evocative description of life in a sleepy Suffolk village during the late 30s, the story soon picks up pace when a young village girl goes missing. Very readable, kept me fully engaged as I wanted to know what would happen next. Recommended read!

September 1939, and school children are being evacuated from London to rural areas in an ultimately well-meaning, but chaotic and disorganised, operation. When a busload of evacuees arrives in the small Suffolk village where Josephine Tey lives, it's all too easy for those with sinister motives to take advantage of the chaos, and a child is soon reported missing.

Dear Little Corpses was gripping and, as always with Upson's Tey books, both brilliantly written and enormously sad. The narrative switches between the mother of one evacuee, and the action in Suffolk, and this contrast only adds to the sense of tragedy.

A wonderful yet sad story, set at the outbreak of WW11 in 1939.
The evacuation of children is underway to get them to safety in the country & this story takes us to a little village in Suffolk.
Things get a little fraught as it appears one little girl has gone missing & the whole village is drawn together in the ensuing search for her.
But all is not what it seems & certain things come to light that puts a whole new perspective on things.
A well developed plot that will keep you hooked & turning those pages.
I have since learnt this is book 10 in a Josephine Tey crime series but can definitely be read as a stand alone book.
Well written British crime fiction that will keep you turning those pages.
I thoroughly enjoyed it & will be looking at more of the books from this author.

With thanks to the author, Faber and Faber publishers, and NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchanged for my honest and unbiased review.

A mass evacuation of children from London to avoid the expected Nazi bombings leads to the arrival in Polstead of several bus loads of little ones looking for temporary homes with the village residents. In the ensuing chaos a local girl goes missing, while tensions rise and secrets threaten to be revealed as the search for the girl goes on!

This was my first book by this author, and I was not aware that it was the latest in a long series when I read it. Perhaps if I had read some of those previous instalments I would have cared a bit more about the characters, but as it was I found myself growing a little indifferent to their various plights as the story unfolded. And there were a lot of characters, especially at the beginning, so I did find it a little difficult to keep track of them all. I also struggled to see what real value some of them (e.g. Noah) brought to the story.

The ending, where the culprit and his crimes are eventually revealed, was dark and quite disturbing. Not a bad thing it itself but for me it felt a little bit rushed. Certainly no happy ending here, but that seems to be a pattern for this series from what I have read subsequently. However, the writer's writing style and use of language is a joy to read, and I felt that she captured and conveyed the mood of the village very well throughout.

This was such a disappointment as I found this very disturbing and quite dark. I struggled through this book and was glad to finish it. It really played on my mind and brought me down. My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book in return for an honest review.

In the days just before the Second World War officially came to the UK, children were evacuated from London to the countryside. Polstead in Suffolk takes a couple of coachloads, but more turn up than they expected and total chaos ensues.
The next day it is realised that a small local girl is missing. It wasn't realised before as her parents thought she was with her Grandma and her Grandma thought she was with her parents. Archie Penfold of the Met Police is visiting and officiates the search for the young girl, organising the locals in the search.
The events that follow uncover decades of deceit, heartbreak and blackmail.
Local author Josephine Tey is in the middle of it all, watching with an authors eye.

I liked this book immensely.

Dear Little Corpses starts as the mass evacuation of children takes place in London. Josephine and Marta are at Josephine’s cottage in Suffolk where the village is preparing for an influx of children. In London, Archie is investigating the death of a rent collector before heading down to visit them for the village fete and so Josephine can meet the woman that he has started seeing. But at the fete a young girl goes missing without a trace and the search for her threatens to expose long hidden secrets in the community. The portrait of the village waiting for the evacuees is great and this also goes over into Essex and places that I am actually familiar with and I’m a total sucker for that.

But I spent a lot of this hoping that it was going to all turn out ok and thinking that this was going to be one of the less bleak books in the series – and then boom, the ending happened and it was every bit as bad as it could be and a little bit more. And that’s the story of the series for me: I go in wanting it to be much closer to the lighter, cozy mystery end of the historical crime series spectrum than it is and at the end.

This book is set during end of August/ beginning of September 1939, where the world is in a tumultuous phase of entering the Second World War.

On the last day of August, Josephine Tey receives a phone call from Hilary, vicar’s wife, informing her that twenty evacuee children will be arriving at Polstead from London. Josephine agrees to help on the day but she doesn’t offer her home to a child. Her partner, Marta loves children, and would have loved to shelter a child, but she is due to depart for Hollywood to work for Alfred Hitchcock.

However, when the children arrive, it soon transpires that there are more than twenty as two full double decker buses turn up. There is chaos in the village and Hilary is running ragged trying to find more homes for the children. Josephine and Marta are ‘forced’ to take in young Noah, a troubled boy, who has experienced hardships in his young life.

Meanwhile, the village is also preparing for an annual summer fete, where one local family discover their child is missing… Inspector Archie Penrose leads the search for the missing girl. Will she be found?

I enjoyed the mystery surrounding certain characters in this story, especially the Herron family. It was clear from the beginning that they were hiding a secret, which was revealed bit by bit.

I found the ending (especially the culprit, his actions and motivations) quite shocking and disturbing.

I felt this story captured the mood of London and evacuees. My heart was breaking when I was reading the parts where parents were saying goodbye to their children and sending them away to English countryside. They had no idea when they would see each other again. As a mother, I cannot fathom how distressing that must have been for both sides.

I also enjoyed the references to Alfred Hitchcock and his first American movie ‘Rebecca’, partly because I am a huge Hitchcock fan!

I must admit that at the beginning I struggled with the introduction of so many characters, however, at the end of the book it all comes nicely together.

Overall, it is a tense mystery.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for a review e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was my first from the series and i'm looking forward to start the series from the beginning.

The book takes place in a small Suffolk village during the evacuation of London at the start of WWII. So there is this cozy, small town vibe, where everyone knows everyone. Members of the village volunteer to house the evacuees during the war, and we see this sense of unknowing and also this sense of community throughout the book.

The first little bit was difficult to get to grasps with the different characters introduced, but once we had met the characters once, it was easy to get into the story.

I liked the way the novel concluded and was shocked by parts of the ending.

Josephine Tey is on a vistt to her cottage in Polstead, Suffolk, for some time with her lover Marta before they are parted once more - Josephine heading back to Scotland and Marta to glamorous Hollywood for a project with Alfred Hitchcock. But this is not exactly the romantic sojourn they both envisaged.

The late summer of 1939 finds Britain on the brink of war and the country holds it's breath for the announcement from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that will confirm their worst fears - that the Great War to end all wars was nothing of the kind. A massive logistical undertaking to evacuate children from London to the relative safety of the countryside has begun, but despite all the forward planning, ferrying a mass of youngsters about the country is proving to be mayhem. No one notices that one of the evacuees has failed to reach her destination...

When far more children arrive in Polstead than anticipated, Josephine and Marta cannot refuse to help. They take in a young London lad called Noah, who is distraught after being split up from his younger sister Betty, who is lodging with the very peculiar Herron family nearby. Noah seems to be hiding something too...

On the eve of the village fete, another young child goes missing - this time, local girl Annie. Suspicion lies thick in the air, and some are pointing fingers at the Herron family. It's down to Scotland Yard DCI Archie Penrose to uncover the truth, despite being absorbed in a case of an unusual stabbing in a stairwell in Hoxton - with the help of Josephine, of course.

Nicola Upson has hit the jackpot once more with a many-layered crime novel that evokes all the wonderful Golden Age vibes of the books of her heroine Josephine Tey. The feel of the between the wars era floods the first part of this novel, cut through with the heart-rending fear of a nation stealing itself for dark days ahead, with people attempting to carry on with a stiff upper lip while fear grips their hearts about what the future holds - especially those haunted by the sorrows of World War One. 

The feeling of time and place in this book is delicious. I particularly loved the village fair scene, where Upson delightfully unites Golden Age Queens Tey and Margery Allingham (author of the Albert Campion books) in a double-handed venture to judge all the highly competitive events underway. This is such a wonderfully humorous episode in the story, full of close examination of splendid agricultural produce, closely fought cake tasting, and fancy-dress judging, that made my heart sing, and was an excellent way to get a closer glimpse at the villagers too - but underneath it all there lies the feeling that something dark is looming over them all, and not just from the impending war. 

This is a very fine period murder mystery, dear readers. Told through the narratives of a variety of characters, some of which are fabulously suspicious in the very best Christie way, the pieces of the puzzle come together slowly and keep you guessing in the most enjoyable fashion. I love a tale full of red herrings and misdirection, with an underlying sinister note of ghosts of the past, and Upson has this down to a tee in this book. The truth, when it comes, is shocking too!

Intriguingly, the introduction of war-time restrictions, closures and isolation from loved ones that Upson describes in this story are curiously reminiscent of the Covid lockdowns we have all been through in recent times, and this brings a poignancy and resonance to this story that was totally unexpected. There is such a feeling of connection with a period way back in time that I found really moving about this.

I have been working my way through these stories and this latest one has absolutely everything I love about them contained within its pages. If you are a fan of Golden Age crime, love great characters, authentic atmosphere, and intricately conceived plots then this is definitely a series for you too!