# 18 The Grace in Older Women (©1995)
Genre: Mystery
Location: England
The Grace in Older Women is a tribute both to lovingly, skillfully faked "antiques" and to the virtues of women who are ugly and aged by conventional standards but whose grace, understanding, and mercy can "sanctify a saint." The story begins with Lovejoy making love with a lady in a forest to get close to her valuable Bilston enamels and ends with him trapped into initiating two aging spinsters (the proprietors of the Lorelei tearooms and of various tourist tours for gullible Americans) in the mysteries of sex. He is later sacrificed to the insatiable appetites of a female pretender to the British throne (by way of Charles Edward Stuart, or "Bonnie Prince Charlie"), who forcibly enlists him to raise funds for her cause, and his mounting of a huge auction of forgeries and fakes (all lovingly described and some perhaps genuine). His able assistant is the highly competent but unattractive mistress of one of Lovejoy's old friends, Tyrer, who is drowned in the local pond and whose mobile "Sex Museum" is torched; the auction is meant to flush out his killer. In the process Lovejoy exposes a mail-order priest and a criminal cop, reveals the source of decay behind the atrophied village of Fenstone, and denounces Bonnie Prince Charlie as a total sham, "Yanks" as litigious and obsessive handshakers, and nature as "lurking." In this novel, as throughout the series, Lovejoy's love of antiques is balanced by his sympathy for birds and beasts, as he nearly faints from the exquisite beauty of a seventeenth-century tortoise-shell fan and then from his recollection of the monstrous cruelties perpetrated on turtles in the process of collecting such shells.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 276: British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1960. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Gina Macdonald, Nicholls State University. Gale Group, 2003. pp. 160-174.
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