Behold, a Mystery!

Behold, a Mystery! is a 1994 Regency mystery by Joan Smith, published in large print by Chivers Press. A young woman becomes involved in an investigation in a country England where the conventions of the period limit what she can ask and where she can go.

The combination is deliberate rather than incidental. A Regency mystery has to accommodate the social restrictions of the period, which means a woman investigator works through households, calls and correspondence rather than through the procedures available to a police officer, and the plot's moves are constrained by etiquette as much as by the puzzle.

Joan Smith wrote a great many novels of this period and setting, and the mystery elements in them are usually mixed with the courtship material rather than separated from it. The investigation is carried by the two leads between them, and the puzzle is solved through the same conversations the courtship runs on.