Julia Bird’s picturesque Cotswolds life is everything she’d dreamed of. Until, that is, she discovers a dead body in the library…

Julia Bird had imagined the quiet of rural life would be soothing after years in the city, but she finds she can’t just sit still.Determined to throw herself into village activities, she joins the library just in time to attend a talk by celebrated local author Vincent Andrews.

Charming, devilishly handsome and talented, Vincent teases the crowd with a reading from his forthcoming novel. Set in a village bearing strange similarities to Berrywick, with characters the audience start to recognise, Vincent hints of dark secrets to be revealed, to gasps of outrage from the room. The meeting ends in uproar, and, just hours later, Vincent’s dead body is discovered behind the bookshelves…

As one of the last people to see him alive, Julia feels morally bound to help the police investigate. With her trusty Labrador, Jake, at her side, she decides to do her own sleuthing and quickly discovers that Vincent’s personal life is messy, his finances are in disarray and his book sales are declining. But most of all, remembering her neighbours’ faces at the book reading, Julia wonders if one of them could have lost the plot enough to kill…

As Julia interrogates the suspects, she walks straight into another scene of murder and mayhem, and realises Vincent’s manuscript is now missing. There’s someone out there who’s deadly serious about keeping their secrets unpublished. Will Julia be able to stop them, before anyone else gets hurt?

Brilliantly twisty, this completely thrilling cozy mystery is perfect for fans of M.C. Beaton, Helena Marchmont and Clare Chase.

 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

She liked to have her morning tea while she pottered about feeding the chickens and investigating developments in the garden. Touring the estate, she called it.

It had become clear to Julia in the months that she’d lived in Berrywick, that the Buttered Scone was secretly the centre of the entire universe. All people and all information would be drawn into it eventually, as if by some inexplicable gravitational pull. And Flo was the centre of the Buttered Scone.

Nicky looked alarmed, or perhaps annoyed. Julia hoped that she hadn’t just started some inter-generational village feud with the woman– this kind of minor infringement of social norms tended to have more extreme consequences in the village than it would in a town. Julia knew of two families who had ceased to speak a generation ago after a disagreement over the correct pronunciation of the word ‘pronunciation’.

My Review:

 

This was a fun and lively read that was easy to fall into and follow, yet was also delightfully unpredictable. I enjoyed the writers’ wry wit and cleverly paced storytelling, I continue to find their work relaxing yet engaging while they keep me increasingly curious as to who the possible murderer is among the village denizens. Each character was graced with a colorful description that brought vivid imagery to mind and a smirk on my face while keeping them recognizable throughout perusal.

I had conjured multiple theories, all of which were wrong. I’m not ashamed to admit that these talented wordsmiths are far cleverer than I am. I also gleaned a fun new addition to my Brit Word and Phrases list with come a cropper, which Mr. Google tells me means to suffer an accident. I can’t wait to use it!