Busman's Honeymoon

Busman's Honeymoon is a novel by the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers, published in 1937. It is her eleventh and last book featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and the fourth in which Harriet Vane appears, and it was written as a stage play before it became a novel.

The wedding takes place after the events of Gaudy Night, and the couple leave the reception without telling the assembled reporters where they are going. They arrive late at night at Talboys, a farmhouse in Harriet's native Hertfordshire, and find it locked up and unprepared for them, which is the first thing that does not fit.

The next morning the man who sold the house is discovered in the cellar with severe head injuries, and the quiet fortnight the two of them had arranged becomes a murder investigation instead. Because they are who they are, they conduct part of it themselves, and the book sets the mechanics of a country-house inquiry beside the beginnings of a marriage in which both parties have professional reasons to notice everything.