Publication: 15th May 2024 – Storm Publishing
A government aide kidnapped, a French diplomat murdered, a killer to uncover…
When mystery writer Marius Quin and his sleuthing partner Lady Bella Montague are hired by a secretive stranger to find a missing civil servant, they immediately set to work. Ernest Castleton was taken at gunpoint days earlier, but with the help of his distraught fiancée, Marius and Bella uncover a vital clue. Ernest hid a cryptic letter in the British Museum, and it sends the intrepid duo on a trail that stretches from the centre of London all the way to the English coast.
The investigation takes on a new twist when they arrive at the home of the British Foreign Secretary only to find a French diplomat murdered in the Grand Hall of the palatial property…
But who pushed Monsieur Rochefort to his death, and what does it have to do with Ernest Castleton’s disappearance? Marius and Bella must choose from a nefarious spy, a double-dealing diplomat and any number of spoilt aristocrats if they wish to catch the killer. With the clock ticking and only twenty-four hours left before the suspects disperse, they must call upon their every skill to stop more innocent people from dying…
A fast, fresh and fun 1920s murder mystery which combines the feel of a classic spy novel with a twisting whodunit, The Castleton Affair will leave you guessing until the very last chapter.
The adventures of mystery writer Marius Quin and his friend / first love Lady Bella Montague continue as they embark on their third investigation. They are hired by a mysterious and quite sinister man to find Ernest Castleton, a civil servant working in the British Foreign Office, who was kidnapped a few days earlier. With the help of his fiancée and a few clues left in a book in the British Museum, Marius and Bella manage to find and rescue Ernest, only to find out that the truth is more complicated.
After managing to get invited to the country house of the British Foreign Secretary while he is hosting a French delegation for a super secret meeting, Marius (who must pretend to be Bella’s very boring fiancée) and Bella, try to uncover the truth, but they get involved in a murder investigation when one of the French delegates is found murdered. Will they find the killer before it’s too late?
I love this series. It is witty, entertaining, and full of twists, even though The Castleton Affair is a bit different from the previous two books. It’s more of a spy novel, with lots of intrigue, but I enjoyed it as much as the others.
Marius and Bella are a fantastic duo of detectives, but my favourite character remains Percy, Marius’s basset hound whose loyalties lay with whoever gives him food.
The story is very well-written and full of detailed historical facts. I enjoyed the subplot about Marius’s father’s mysterious disappearance and I am looking forward to reading more about it in the next books. Conspiracies, deception, secrets, and twists kept me completely engrossed in this intriguing third book in the Marius Quin Mystery series (which can also be easily read as a standalone) and I am looking forward to the next one!
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 city in the north of Spain, with my French-Spanish wife and our two young 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 becoming a bestseller. I have a new series called “The Marius Quin Mysteries” coming in November 2023.
If you’d like to tell me what you think about my detectives, my writing or the world at large, I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to get in touch at www.benedictbrown.net where you can also download my free mystery novellas and join my readers’ club.
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