‘Remember, abseiling is only the second fastest way down a church tower.’
The note pinned to the teddy bear lying at the foot of the church tower could have been a joke – if it hadn’t been for the body on the path next to it!
Somebody wants to make very sure that everyone knows this was not an accident or suicide. But why?
Suddenly, no one in the village has any enthusiasm for the Teddy Bear Abseil, planned to raise money for the children’s play area, as, once again, a murderer walks the narrow, twisty streets of the small Somerset village of Much Winchmoor.
And, once again, Kat Latcham, reporter/dog walker/barmaid and occasional reluctant hair salon gopher finds herself unwillingly dragged into a murder investigation.
This fourth Much Winchmoor mystery is spiked with humor and sprinkled with romance.
And, of course, one carefully planned, coldly executed murder.
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
“I said back then the two of them were totally incombustible. And I was proved right.” “I think maybe you mean incompatible,”
I don’t know who she is. Certainly no one I’d ever seen in the village before with her short skirt, ridiculous shoes and black nails. She looked like a leftover from a Halloween party.
Everyone knows everyone else’s business. If someone sneezes at one end of the village, someone down the other end will have said who they’d been with and what they’d been up to, to catch the cold in the first place.
Overbearing, pompous and far too full of his own self-importance for someone who used to be one of Much Winchmoor’s big cheeses… He only avoided prosecution because he resigned his position on the council. He was not even a little cheese anymore. More a ‘past its best’ mouldy old Cheddar.
I’d never noticed her fingernails before, but it was like she’d suddenly turned into Edward Scissorhands on a bad day.
My Review:
Paula Willilams is such a wicked tease. Normally, I would be fuming over the tantalizing yet incomplete and open-ended storylines yet Ms. Williams has definitely snagged my interest while each new installment keeps me hopelessly ensnared with her delightfully captivating and fiendishly clever cozy murder mysteries and the will they/won’t they romance for childhood friends, Kat and Will. She achieves an exacting balance of wry humor, red herring and deftly buried clues, family drama, eccentric characters, and small-town gossip intermingling with intrigue. She has done it to me yet again with her latest smirk-worthy offering and I am chafing at the bit to see who she offs next and what she does about Will in the next episode.
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’.
