Wedding Treasure

Wedding Treasure is a mystery novel by the British writer Stuart David Williams, published in 1985. It is one of his series about the merchant banker and amateur sleuth Mark Treasure.

Marton Manor in rural Herefordshire is the setting for a wedding that has been arranged at short notice, and the first puzzle is why the bride, Fleur Jarvas, is in such a hurry when marrying before her twenty-first birthday will forfeit a substantial inheritance. Mark and Molly Treasure are among the guests, and the bride's father turns up uninvited after years away from his daughter. The rituals of the wedding eve take up the first part of the book, and by the following morning there are two unexplained deaths, a disappearance and a case that needs the kind of attention the police are not giving it. Williams writes these books as country house mysteries in the classic manner, with an amateur detective whose professional competence makes him useful, and the comedy of the arrangements is part of the pleasure.

Williams worked for many years as a director of the British Museum, and the series, which began in the 1970s, is set in a version of England in which institutions and their finances are as suspicious as their inhabitants.