The Old Contemptibles — Martha Grimes

It is a rainy day in London's Camden Passage when Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury meets a pretty and strangely troubled widow named Jane Holdsworth. He is drawn into a passionate affair with her--and becomes a suspect in a murder investigation.

Unable to leave London, Jury sends Melrose Plant, eighth Earl of Caverness, to the Lake District to pry open the Holdsworth family's locked box of secrets. Posing as an eccentric librarian--hardly too out of character--Plant goes from scruffy pub to child's tree house accumulating a sheaf of shocking surprises about the death-prone Holdsworth clan and its growing number of orphans.

But the solution to the shattering affair doesn't emerge until Jury and Sergeant Wiggins join Plant at the Old Contemptibles pub for a stiff draught of cold reality....