Publication: 22nd February 2024 – Storm Publishing
A series of threatening letters, a forgotten figure from the past, and a killer out to settle scores…
England 1928. Mystery writer Marius Quin receives alarming news from his sleuthing partner Lady Bella Montague that their childhood friends are in danger. Back in their charming village of Hurtwood, the three Heaton cousins have all been sent identical death threats. When the local constable refuses to help, it’s up to Marius and Bella to stop the would-be killer. But they arrive too late, and Marius finds his former best friend dead in his kitchen with a knife through the heart…
Who in this tightly knit community wants to eliminate the Heaton family? Between shady business practices, fierce competition over the village’s best garden award, and the tragic tale of a soldier who never returned from the war, it’s more a case of who doesn’t? With the clock ticking, can Bella and Marius figure out the mystery before the two remaining cousins meet their fate?
Everyone in the village of Hurtwood loves Lucinda Heaton, despite her family’s reprehensible past, so who is sending her poison-pen letters threatening her life? After their success in solving the murder of an actor on New Year’s Eve, that’s what crime author Marius Quin and his childhood sweetheart and now friend and partner-in-crime Lady Isabella “Bella” Montague intend to figure out. However, Marius hasn’t been back in Hurtwood in ten years, since he left to fight the war in Europe and his father’s disappearance. Most of his childhood friends welcome him back warmly, some less than others, including his former best friend, James Heaton, who, as his cousin Lucinda and his sister Tilly, has received the threatening letters and who is then found stabbed in his own kitchen. With Lucinda and Tilly’s lives in danger, Marius and Bella need to find the killer quickly. Is the killer someone in the village, someone who they’ve known their whole life, or is an outsider?
The Hurtwood Village Murders is the second book in the Marius Quin Mystery series and I had so much fun reading it that I am already looking forward to the next one. Bella and Marius are a brilliant duo of detectives. Coming from different backgrounds, she is the daughter of a duke, he is the son of the local lawyer, Marius and Bella were first childhood friends, then they fell in love, but they broke things off when he left for the war. Now they have found each other again, close friends and occasional detectives, solving crimes full of suspects and surprises.
Witty, engaging, immersive, and well-written and with a picturesque village as the setting of a murder, The Hurtwood Village Murders is the perfect cozy mystery to keep you quite entertained for a few hours. Highly recommended!
A huge thank you to Storm Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a proof of the novel.
I’m a Welsh-Irish-Englishman originally from South London but now living in Burgos, a beautiful medieval city in the north of Spain, with my French-Spanish wife and two our ridiculously international children. Writing has always been my passion. It was my favourite half-an-hour a week at primary school, and I started on my first, truly abysmal book as a teenager. So it wasn’t a difficult decision to study literature at university which led to an MA in Creative Writing.I grew up in a crime-fiction-mad family and had made a few clumsy attempts at writing one over the years before coming up with the idea for my contemporary whodunits “The Izzy Palmer Mysteries”. My second series, the 1920s-set “Lord Edgington Investigates…”, has been a great success, with each of the books making a mark on the mystery charts, and I’m about to launch a second historical series.If you’d like to tell me what you think about my detectives, my writing or the world at large, feel free to get in touch at http://www.benedictbrown.net where you can also download my free mystery novellas.
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