It was meant to be a break from running the All’s Well, that’s the bookshop I inherited from my aunt Violet in a village called Abbeymead, deep in the Sussex countryside. I’d agreed to travel with Jack Carrington, our local crime writer, to a place called Treleggan on the Helford River in Cornwall. He’s someone—I hate to admit it—that I’ve come to like a little too much. Jack had a new book to write and I was going along to help him with the research—or maybe simply have a holiday. You don’t have to do a thing, Flora, he’d said. Take the time off and have a complete rest. That was the idea at least.

But it’s difficult to have a complete rest when you find a dead body in the garden of your rented cottage, the morning after you arrive. Maybe you could do it, shrug your shoulders and leave it to the police, but I’ve always been someone who has to get to the bottom of things. In other words, nosy—that’s Jack’s opinion. It was a bit of a shock, I confess, finding Roger, our landlord, with his throat cut, but when the police decided the killer must be a random mugger whom Roger had disturbed, I had to act. I mean, how ridiculous! A random mugger in a small Cornish village? Anyway what was Roger doing in our garden so early in the morning? And how did he actually get there without walking through our cottage? Was it possible he was meeting someone, a secret tryst, and if so who? These were the questions the police should have asked from the start, and when they didn’t, I had to.

Roger, it turned out, was a man about to change his life and that included changing his will. I had it from Jessie Bolitho, his housekeeper, who had a soft spot for her employer. If Roger changed his will, it meant there were quite a few people who stood to lose—his rascally younger brother and his estranged wife, for instance. Jessie had no time for either. She was thoroughly caustic about them.

Inheritance was likely to have been the motive but there was a second possibility. I suspected the murder might have connections to a history buried in the ashes of the Second World War. The question was did Roger’s digging around for information on wartime in Cornwall have something to do with his death? Particularly the information he’d turned up on the secret signals centre that Jack and I discovered a few miles from Treleggan. So from day one, I followed my nose.

Jack is always chiding me that I rush head-first into trouble and I suppose he’s right— he’s the one who stands back, thinks logically and acts cautiously—but finding Roger’s battered body signalled the danger lying ahead, for him as much as for me. Logic and caution can only take you so far, and we both knew we had to find the villain or we could be facing a nasty end. Still, I did get to meet a real life witch in the process and not many people can say that.

Murder at Primrose Cottage, A Flora Steele Mystery #3
Genre: Historical
Release: March 2022
Purchase Link – Digital only

Join Flora Steele – bookshop owner, bicycle-rider, daydreamer and amateur detective – in her quest to solve a brand-new murder mystery!

Cornwall, 1956: When Flora Steele sets off for a peaceful vacation with crime writer Jack Carrington in his little red Austin, the last thing she expects to find is a body at their pretty rental cottage!

Shocked by the discovery, inquisitive Flora joins forces with handsome Jack to find out how the poor man came to such an untimely end in the overgrown orchard of Primrose Cottage. They discover Roger Gifford was a man with plenty of friends and the villagers seem devastated by his sudden death. . .

So why was he murdered? And who has blood on their hands – his estranged wife Beatrice, his wayward younger brother Lionel, or the suspicious newcomer Mercy Dearlove?

The baffling case gets even more complicated when a second man is found dead and a set of puzzling clues lead them to an intriguing wartime mystery connected to Jack’s estranged father.

As old secrets emerge and Jack receives an unsettling letter, it seems the crime writer is in danger of a fate befitting his fictional characters. Will Flora be able to crack the case and save Jack? Or will this be one murder too many for Flora Steele?

Meet the author
Merryn taught university literature for many years, and it took a while to pluck up the courage to begin writing herself. Bringing the past to life is a passion and her historical fiction includes Regency romances, wartime sagas and timeslip novels, all of which have a mystery at their heart. As the books have grown darker, it was only a matter of time before she plunged into crime with a cosy crime series set in rural Sussex against the fascinating backdrop of the 1950s.

All comments are welcomed.