Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed A Witch in Notting Hill by Alexandra Paige as a fun pick for Halloween. Heather enjoyed Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas and shared some funny quotes from it. Tina liked the family drama in Whale Harbor by Mary Beth Keane. Jane read a bunch of British nonfiction in 2026 in preparation for a trip to Scotland.

Book: The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair
Genre: Historical mystery
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Publication date: 2019

Source: e-book borrowed from library

Summary: At the end of World War II, people are ready to resume their disrupted life paths. But, everything has changed including the path to romance.

Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge start a marriage bureau in London for people who didn’t get the chance in wartime to meet romantic partners in the conventional ways. Their clients are anxious, now, to put the horrors of war behind them and to step boldly into their futures.

Just as the The Right Sort Marriage Bureau begins to have some initial success, disaster strikes. A young woman, a new client, is found stabbed to death and the police arrest the man that Iris and Gwen chose as her match.

When the press gets wind of the juicy story that a marriage bureau set up a young woman with her murderer, the business appears to be as dead as the victim. But Iris and Gwen refuse to believe that their mild-mannered client is the murderer and they set out to solve the crime, absolve the wrongly accused man, and save their own futures as independent business women.

Thoughts: The immediate post-war setting was fascinating to me because I haven’t ready many books set in that time period.

Rationing was a huge part of life in post-war Britain and had a major role in the plot of The Right Sort of Man.

More interesting, though, was how the prevalence of grief and trauma affected every character in this book. The theme of the time is to heal and restore and get back to normal, but it’s also apparent that every person’s ‘normal’ was smashed to smithereens in the war, like many of London’s buildings.

Appeal: If you’re looking for a cozy mystery, this might not hit the spot. I thought the villainous characters were a bit too scary for that, although the violence is mostly off-stage. There are scenes in a grand British townhouse featuring a drawing room, library, and nursery. But there are a lot more scenes in a run-down office building, pubs, a prison, and other places that are far less cozy.

With humor and likeable characters, though, I found The Right Sort of Man to be a pleasant book to read for a distraction from current turmoil.

An advantage of being late to discover a mystery series is that I can immediately move on to several more books. Book #8 of the Sparks & Bainbridge Mysteries, Fire Must Burn, was published this year.