Publication: 21st October 2025 (paperback); 10th November 2025 (eBook) – Storm Publishing
The snow falls, carollers sing, and a killer plots his next move…
London, 1928. Marius Quin and Lady Bella Montague are ready for a quiet Christmas when they learn that Bella’s beloved Aunt Adele has met a shocking end in her picture-perfect cottage. Immediately heading for Holly Village, the enclave of retired aristocrats and eccentric pensioners where Adele lived, they discover that her death was far from natural.
The dead woman’s priceless Manet painting has vanished, and a cryptic note she left hints at scandalous goings-on among her neighbours. When another resident is murdered during the village Christmas party, it’s clear that a devious killer is preying on the sleepy community. Marius and Bella must navigate a web of village intrigue, false identities, and long-buried scandals to stop this from being a Christmas to remember for all the wrong reasons…
It’s Christmas time in the sixth book in the Marius Quin Mystery series. After the events of the previous books, crime author and sleuth Marius Quin and his first love/partner in detection/best friend (who he is still in love with) Lady Bella Montague are celebrating Christmas at Bella’s family house where he has a weird meeting with her honorary aunt Adele which takes a more sinister turn when they find out that she had died shortly after returning home from the party. Still uneasy about his encounter with Adele and not at all convinced that her death was natural, Marius and Bella decide to investigate, by visiting her home at Holly Village in Highgate. Described as “the very definition of picturesque”, Holly Village is a closed and exclusive community, a “village within a town within a city”, but its inhabitants are hiding something and Marius and Bella are determined to find out what.
The Holly Village Murders takes a break from the mysteries still unsolved from the previous books for a brand new mystery, so it can easily be read as a stand-alone, a Christmas cozy mystery. Marius and Bella are a resolute and remarkable duo of detectives. While the police don’t believe that Adele’s murder is suspicious, they are convinced that something strange is going on in the idyllic Holly Village, with its quirky pensioners, their secrets and their false identities.
The Holly Village Murders is yet another witty, engaging, and immersive mystery from Benedict Brown, an intriguing mystery that kept me glued to the pages and made me look forward to the next Marius and Bella’s sleuthing adventure!
A huge thank you to Storm Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a proof of this intriguing mystery
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.
Book After Book 
This sounds like it’d make a great TV show too 😃
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It would be great!
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