#TopTenTuesday A Spring Clean in Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is a freebie on the theme of Spring Cleaning which we are invited to interpret in any way we like. My list is a combination of books in which cleaners turn detective and books in which characters get an opportunity for a metaphorical ‘spring clean’ of their lives.

In Strangers’ Houses by Elizabeth Mundy – Hungarian cleaner, Lena Szarka, suspects one of her clients is to blame when her friend Timea disappears but with the police unwilling to share her suspicions it’s left to Lena to turn sleuth and find her friend.
A Clean Canvas by Elizabeth Mundy – when a valuable painting goes missing, Lena becomes embroiled in the art world which turns out to be a place of thwarted talents, unpaid debts and elegant fraudsters
A Messy Affair by Elizabeth Mundy – when Lena’s cousin Sarika and Sarika’s reality TV star boyfriend Terry receive threatening notes Lena is forced to explore the grubby world of reality television, and online dating.  
The Playground Murders (The Detective’s Daughter #7) by Lesley Thomson – When cleaner, Stella Darnell, isn’t tackling dust and dirt, and restoring order to chaos, she’s solving murders.

The  Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin – Four very different women respond to an advertisement in The Times appealing to ‘those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine’ to rent a small medieval Italian castle for a month. The climate and the castle eventually start to have an effect on the four women, shifting their perceptions shift and waking them up to the love in their lives.
Summer  in Provence by Lucy Coleman – Married couple Fern and Aiden embark on a ‘marriage gap year’ but is a change as good as a rest, and will their time apart transform their marriage or drive them further apart?
The House That Alice Built by Chris Penhall – A postcard from Buenos Aires turns Alice’s life upside down and, before she knows it, she’s in Cascais, Portugal beginning to learn how to ‘go with the flow’.
A Wedding in the Olive Garden by Leah Fleming – Sara Loveday flees to the beautiful island of Santaniki vowing to change her life. Spotting a gap in the local tourist market, she sets up a wedding plan business specialising in ‘second time around’ couples.
The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers – No one quite knows where Agnès Morel, the woman who cleans the cathedral of Chartres each morning, came from. And yet everyone she encounters agrees she is subtly transforming their lives, even if they can’t quite say how. 
Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson – Three women thrown together by chance discover a sense of purpose they hadn’t possessed before during a canal journey on a narrowboat.