Burying Bad News
(Much Winchmoor Mystery #3)
by Paula Williams
One severed head, two warring neighbors – and a cold-blooded killer stalks Much Winchmoor.
There’s the murder made to look like a tragic accident and a missing husband. Could he be victim number two?
The tiny Somerset village is fast gaining a reputation as the murder capital of the West Country, and once again, reporter/barmaid/dog walker, Kat Latcham, finds herself reluctantly dragged into the investigation.
Things are looking bad for Ed Fuller, the husband of one of Kat’s oldest friends. Kat is convinced he’s innocent – but she’s been wrong before. Has Kat come across her biggest challenge yet?
Fans of Janet Evanovich could well enjoy this “funky, modern-day nosey detective” transported to the English countryside.
The third Much Winchmoor mystery is, as always, spiked with humor and sprinkled with a touch of romance.
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
No one ever gets to use Elsie’s doorbell because as soon as they come within a metre of her gate, her front door shudders under the weight of what sounds like a pack of hell hounds who hadn’t been walked or fed for a fortnight. In fact, the noise comes from Prescott, a small brown and white Jack Russell terrier who bites first and asks questions later. If ever a pair deserve each other, it’s Elsie and Prescott. She’s a cantankerous old lady with scarecrow hair, a fondness for Homer Simpson slippers and a tongue sharp enough to slice shoe leather. He’s a cantankerous dog with hair like an over-used toothbrush and a fondness for ankles, trousers – in fact, anything that comes within range of his snapping jaws.
I didn’t think much of her handiwork. Olive looked like an overstuffed cauliflower while Elsie’s hair looked like a Brillo pad that’s been plugged in to an electric socket.
Olive thought the murderer might be the man who delivered the free newspaper every other week because he looked like Boris Karloff.
“She gets things muddled.” She leaned across and said in a whisper loud enough to be heard in the next room. “She does my head in sometimes. I’m sure she’s got those senior dimensions, you know.”
My Review:
I enjoy Paula Williams’s sly wit and snarky observational humor and I have always found her agile storytelling and well-plotted cozy mysteries to be giggle-snort worthy. Combining her comical style with original and intriguing crimes that embroil the quirky residents of a uniquely odd small village/murder capital certainly makes for a fun and lively read with storylines that have never failed to keep me guessing as well as pleasantly entertained and engaged throughout perusal. Her eccentric little village delights with recognizable small-town issues and tendencies, which are far more amusing in print than in reality. I particularly find myself looking forward to any characters’ verbal exchanges with Elsie due to her tendencies for amusing malaprops, something my own grandmother was known to do.
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, UK, where she lives with her husband and a handsome but not always obedient rescue dog, a Dalmatian called Duke. She is very proud to be a member of both the UK Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Crime Writers’ Association.
Her Much Winchmoor Mysteries are based in a small Somerset village that bears an uncanny resemblance to her own – although none of her friends and neighbors have murderous tendencies – as far as she knows! Her novels often feature a murder or two, a dog and cat or two, and are always spiked with humor and sprinkled with a touch of romance.
Paula is, indeed, living her dream. But she worries that one day she’s going to wake up and find she still has to bully her brothers into performing ‘the play what she wrote’.
I love a book you can giggle snort through. Great review.