Mrs Emmeline Lucas, known to all as "la Lucia", is the undisputed social and cultural leader of the quiet, but refined country village of Riseholme. Together with her husband, and her devoted courtier Georgie Pillson, she leads her subjects in hunts for Roman remains and fossils. Meanwhile two very different visitors arrive in the village, and the balance of Riseholme power is temporarily upset.

La Lucia looks at life in Riseholme before the start of the Mapp and Lucia novels by E.F.Benson, and is written in sincere tribute to these comic but yet sympathetic portraits of middle-class society in England in the 1920s and 1930s. It is the third book in Hugh Ashton's Mapp and Lucia series, following Mapp at Fifty and Mapp's Return, which have been enjoyed by fans of the original stories: