It's nearly Christmas in the small English town of Little Wittering, and retired teacher Sally Smith is enjoying an afternoon in the hair salon.
Until she sniffs out a corpse.
With a body in the broom cupboard and a police-imposed lock-in until the culprit is caught, it doesn't take long to deduce someone in the salon is a cold-blooded killer.
Sally's most challenging former pupil may have scraped through Police College but he's as incompetent as ever, so when the cops think they've collared the criminal, Sally's not sure they've made the right cut.
Can a blind woman identify the true culprit or will Sally's sleuthing make her the chief suspect – or the next victim?
Claude, Gord, Alice, and Maud is the first of Jinny Alexander's new British small-town cosy mystery series, Mrs Smith's Suspects, and introduces a thoroughly entertaining modern-day version of a Golden Age locked room mystery.