Murder in the Midi

Can anyone ever really change? Christopher and Amaryllis ask themselves this question when a young man comes to the door of their holiday caravan one wet evening.

The attempt to answer it takes them and their friends on a dangerous journey from a Pitkirtly ice-cream shop to a knitting club and then to a cattery before they reach a dangerous conclusion in an old railway yard.

A Pitkirtly mystery

Reunited in Death is a sequel to the quirky Crime in the Community, which is already available from Smashwords.

Reunited in Death was a quarter finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for 2011 and received the following comments in a review by Publisher's Weekly:

'An unlikely cast of endearingly eccentric characters distinguish this offbeat mystery set in Pitkirtly, an appropriately quirky town on the Scottish coast....Memorable characters, delightful word pictures -- an assistant librarian "looked like a piece of chewed string" -- and understated humor highlight a novel with real promise.'

When the Happiness Club comes to town, Maisie Sue sees it as an opportunity to rediscover romance, Jock McLean regards it with suspicion, and Jemima and Dave look forward to taking part in new activities with their friends. Amaryllis and Chief Inspector Smith go along to keep an eye on developments on their patch. As for Christopher, he misses the start of the excitement because of a prior engagement - walking the Fife Coastal Path with a figure from his past.

But before anyone has had very much fun, it becomes clear that while the Happiness Club brings good times to some, to others it offers only desolation and death.

In this cosy mystery, Scottish distillery heiress Fiona Sutherland returns to the bucolic village of her childhood to assume her role in the family business only to discover her true expertise is jousting with enigmatic Chief Inspector Nick Dawson when her grandmother’s friend falsely confesses to the murder of the local greenkeeper two days before the start of the British Open.

A village detective series with a delightful slice of humor.

In the village of Castle Farthing a mean-spirited, spiteful, curmudgeonly old man is found drugged and strangled in the kitchen of his cottage, with no obvious clues to the perpetrator of the crime.

DI Falconer and Acting DS Carmichael are summoned from the police headquarters in the nearby town of Market Darley and begin to uncover a web of grudges against the old man and a sea of familial connections between those who knew him.

As the heat of July continues relentlessly, tempers flare, disturbing the usual rural calm of the village, and the normally imperterbable Harry Falconer. Faced with a crime with no obvious prime suspect and the idiosyncraces of his new parter,Carmichael, he feels that he is gradually losing his grip on the case as the body count rises.

Undecided whether he has one or two murderers to bring to justice, only a moment of serendipity will show him how events actually unfolded, and allow him to close his File on Castle Farthing, still smarting from the hideous twist with which events finally come to a head.

Frozen in Crime is the fifth novel in the Pitkirtly mystery series.

As Christmas approaches, deep snow cloaks the little town of Pitkirtly, an armed robbery takes place and Jemima’s husband Dave disappears.

Amaryllis, searching for adventure, wants to go on an epic quest but Christopher, needless to say, isn’t at all happy about the prospect. They both find themselves trekking through the snow anyway. Meanwhile at the police station Charlie Smith and his men, trapped at work by the weather, celebrate Christmas in style with microwaved sprouts and virtual crackers.

Things can only get worse as, under cover of snow and ice, two desperate men make their evil plans.

Walking into Murder is a cozy mystery with a strong setting and distinctive characters: wonderfully appealing amateur sleuth Laura Morland, a Professor of Gender Studies; a country manor full of British eccentrics, and the Cotswolds, site of Laura’s planned walking tour through England’s quaintest villages and most verdant countryside.

Still smarting from her husband’s unexpected (though not entirely unwelcome) defection, Laura accepts an invitation to teach a seminar on gender in London. First, she decides to test her new independence by walking the Cotswold Way. The walk soon takes unexpected turns. Lost in thick fog, Laura is accosted by a man who may or may not be a murderer but forces her to pose as his wife lest someone be killed. Escorted at gunpoint to Torrington Manor by an aristocratic Englishman, she is confronted by a formidable grande dame, an outrageously rude child and a houseful of other eccentrics. When she discovers a dead body that keeps changing its identity in one of the bedrooms, Laura realizes that someone in the Manor is a killer. But who? Everyone in this bizarre household seems to have multiple identities and multiple motivations, which means that any of them could be the villain.

Laura’s curiosity is almost as uncontrollable as her over-curly hair, and she tackles the mystery with abandon. The plot gets ever more tangled, the list of suspects longer, and Laura’s verbal battles with her abductor – to whom she is undeniably attracted – more pointed. She finds allies as well: Catherine, a free-spirited American runaway whose involvement leads to a breath-taking confrontation on the moors, Nigel, a teen-ager with multiple talents like mask-making and sculpture, and (possibly) a former theatrical dresser. A more dubious occasional ally is Laura’s alternately charming and irritating, and always baffling, would-be husband.

As the efforts of the villains to silence her become more frantic, Laura’s strategies to escape them become more ingenious. With her usual disregard for the escalating danger, she vows to outwit them all. And she does. In a final dramatic scene with an unexpected twist, she zeroes in on the murderer, or it might be more accurate to say the murderer zeroes in on her.

The villagers of Stoney Cross were bustling about like hyperactive ants. In gardens, houses, and the village hall, figures flitted to and fro making last- minute preparations for their 'Great Event'. After four months of furious debate and power-struggling organisation, the first Stoney Cross Arts Festival was to commence on Saturday 5th September and last for two whole days.

Posters were everywhere, promoting this rare rural treat, but a last-minute suggestion to enlist the aid of a local radio broadcaster to advertise, then review their efforts, added an extra frisson of excitement.

The delight of some of those involved, however, soon turned to dismay when the broadcaster, Marcus Willoughby, actually moved into a house in Stoney Cross the day before the Festival, turning out to be someone from their past: someone whom they had hoped never to clap eyes on again, and who had greeted them with recogntion in his eyes.

To those he had never met before, he proved to be a smarmy, spiteful bigot who proceeded to take great delight in verbally shredding their artistic efforts.

When he was found dead at his desk, only a week after moving into his new home, his demise actually having been broadcast during his pre-recorded programme on Radio Carsfold, there were no crocodile tears shed. He had finally been 'choked off' in mid-flow.

His arrival in the village had obviously caused a few guilty hearts to beat faster, and precipitated a few hasty confessions of dark deeds thought buried in the past.

Into this welter of emotions was dispatched DI Harry Falconer, his trusty (?) acting detective sergeant, 'Davey' Carmichael, riding shotgun, as they entered 'bandit' country once more.

Realtor Veronica Gillis is loud and aggressive and some people hate her. Police Captain Alexander Moffat, routinely described as soft-spoken and kind, begins the first homicide investigation of his new job in California’s picturesque Gold Country when her body is discovered at the church she planned to convert to condominiums.

Moffat and young Sergeant Jason De la Peña quickly identify six suspects each with a motive and no alibi. Then, less than twenty-four hours later, a man in a ski mask attacks Nicole Davies and Moffat finds reason to believe his predecessors overlooked a pattern of crimes going back three decades.

The Gillis and Davies cases tug for Moffat’s attention. Dogged and thoughtful police work yields leads including DNA matches that are not human, surveillance video that unravels two alibis, ballistics evidence linking two murders and newspaper clippings from 1970 that hold vital clues. Along the way, Moffat stages a successful decoy operation, is drawn into a dangerous stand off at the high school with an armed teenage suspect and narrowly escapes death when the manhunt for the serial killer turns into a high speed car chase.

In the quiet village of Steynham St Michael there is an anonymous letter-writer at large, jabbing and stabbing at the past's Achilles' heels of many of the upright citizens living there.

After one resident is driven to extreme measures to escape exposure, another is driven to murder.

In the village cards club that meets once a week, tongues begin to wag, not only about the identities of the murderer and the anonymous letter writer, but also about who exactly has received a letter.

There are also changes afoot at Market Darley Police Headquarters, as the national economy dictates that it accepts the straitened circumstsncres planned for it, and complies with recommendations for change.

And before any of this even happens, DI Harry Falconer drifts up from unconsciousness to find himself in complete darkness and barely able to move, while the only thing he can hear is that of someone moaning in pain.