The Flower Committee

In Pennycombe, the foxgloves came up tall the summer everything changed—beautiful, poisonous, and nodding over the churchyard wall as if they already knew a secret.

Eleanor Fenwick knows a thing or two about poison. Her late husband was the village doctor, and he taught her that the same flower that stops a heart in a meadow can save a life in a tablet. It's all in the dose. Nine months a widow, chair of the church flower committee, and the woman who taught half of Pennycombe its times tables, Nell measures her grief in flower rotas and keeps her sharp eyes to herself.

Then celebrity baking judge Gideon Frost comes home. A local boy made famous, made rich, and made thoroughly disliked, he arrives to open the summer fête and judge the bake-off—trailing television glamour, a career built on other people's ruin, and a great many people who would be glad to see him gone. The baker he destroyed on national television. The sister he means to turn out of her cottage. The woman whose grandmother's recipe made his name. When Frost collapses dead in the refreshments tent among the Victoria sponges and the bunting, the police see a tired heart and an obvious culprit. Case closed.

But Nell is not satisfied. She knows her neighbours' grudges and griefs far too well to believe in easy answers, and beneath Pennycombe's cheerful surface lie a stolen recipe, a hidden bankruptcy, and an old death that refuses to stay buried. So the gentlest woman in the village begins to read the clues the way she once read her pupils—patiently, kindly, and all the way to the truth.

A warm, fair-play village mystery for readers who love a clever amateur sleuth, a marmalade cat, and an English summer with something rotten underneath.

Everyone in Pennycombe has something to mourn, and someone to protect. Step through the churchyard gate and find out who.