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When self-styled ‘lady of the manor’, Margot Duckett-Trimble, announces she wouldn’t be seen dead drinking the stuff, who could have foreseen that, only a few days later, she’d be found, face down, in a vat of it?

Kat Latcham’s no stranger to murder. Indeed, the once ‘sleepy’ Somerset village of Much Winchmoor is fast gaining a reputation as the murder capital of the West Country and is ‘as sleepy as a kid on Christmas Eve’ when it’s discovered there’s a murderer running loose in the community again.

Kat has known Abe all her life, and she is sure that, although he had motive, he didn’t kill Margot. But as she investigates, the murderer strikes again. And the closer Kat gets to finding out who the real killer is, the closer to danger she becomes.

This second Much Winchmoor mystery is once again spiked with humor and sprinkled with romance – plus a cast of colorful characters, including a manic little dog called Prescott whose bite is definitely worse than his bark.

 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I’m parched and it doesn’t do for people of my age to get de-hibernated.

 

She gave a small, tinkly and oh-so-feminine laugh. How did she do that? If I tried it, it would come out as somewhere between a hiccup and a sneeze.

 

I kid you not, if someone sneezed at one end of the village, someone at the other end would hear it and speculate as to what they’d been doing to catch a cold, where, and with whom.

 

He was a short, dapper little man, who looked more like a bank manager than a policeman. The sort of bank manager who would take great pleasure in calling in your overdraft.

 

She’s also got a new coffee machine – that she has no idea how to work – even though she thinks coffee is the drink of the devil and it gives her ‘paltry-patians’.

 

 My Review:

 

While a continuation of a series and picked up shortly after the first book Murder Served Cold ended, it did not appear necessary to have read the previous book as the story had strong legs and could dance well enough on its own. Although, it was an amusing and fun read and I’d recommend reading it anyway. The storylines were highly amusing, pleasantly entertaining, and contained several interesting unrelated yet clever twists along with an unpredictable and well-plotted mystery.

Katie was still ensconced in her childhood bedroom within her parents’ home; still struggling to find full-time employment; still deeply in debt after her louse of a boyfriend took off with her car, money, and Dr. Who swag; and after crashing her mother’s car, her transportation was limited to a pink bike she’d received on her thirteenth birthday. Her dad was eager for her luck to improve as he had plans for her room that involved a snooker table.

Unable to find a full-time job, Katie was taking on small jobs to at least make payments on her looming overdraft, and one such position was as a helper to the injured elderly Elsie who appeared to be the town’s epicenter of information and gossip, the crankiest of residents, and the owner of Prescott – the most annoying and yappiest of little dogs.

This tiny village hosted a bevy of the quirk and was a hotbed of gossip. Adding to the mix and delighting the residents with something new to speculate about was the arrival of Katie’s rather vile Aunty Tanya, an opportunistic and pink obsessed drama queen who apparently enjoyed blackmail, stirring up trouble, a lavish lifestyle, gross exaggeration, and who somewhat resembled and dressed like a skinny Dolly Parton with a deflated chest.

After indulging in several tense thrillers, I enjoyed the generous dollops of humor and snickered and smirked my way through this delightful tale.   I also scored three new additions to my Brit Word List with po-faced – which is a solemn facial expression; trolleyed – drunk; and she’s no better than she should be – a woman with loose morals. I’m not sure about the last one but I’d much rather be trolleyed than po-faced.

Paula Williams is living her dream. She’s written all her life – her earliest efforts involved blackmailing her unfortunate younger brothers into appearing in her plays and pageants. But it’s only in recent years that she discovered to her surprise that people with better judgment than her brothers actually liked what she wrote and were prepared to pay her for it.

Now, she writes every day in a lovely, book-lined study in her home in Somerset, where she lives with her husband and a handsome but not always obedient rescue Dalmatian called Duke. She started out writing fiction for women’s magazines (and still does) but has recently branched out into longer fiction. She also writes a monthly column, Ideas Store, for the writers’ magazines, Writers’ Forum.

But, as with the best of dreams, she worries that one day she’s going to wake up and find she still has to bully her brothers into reading ‘the play what she wrote’.

Social Media Links 

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Website. paulawilliamswriter.co.uk