Today it's my turn on the BlogTour Rough and Deadly by Paula Williams. It's a cosy mystery with a lot of snark and a cast of delightfully eccentric and colourful characters
Paula Williams is living her dream. She’s written all her life – her earliest efforts involved blackmailing her unfortunate younger brothers into appearing in her plays and pageants. But it’s only in recent years that she discovered to her surprise that people with better judgement than her brothers actually liked what she wrote and were prepared to pay her for it.
Now, she writes every day in a lovely, book-lined study in her home in Somerset, where she lives with her husband and a handsome but not always obedient rescue Dalmatian called Duke. She started out writing fiction for women’s magazines (and still does) but has recently branched out into longer fiction. She also writes a monthly column, Ideas Store, for the writers’ magazines, Writers’ Forum.
But, as with the best of dreams, she worries that one day she’s going to wake up and find she still has to bully her brothers into reading ‘the play what she wrote’.
Follow @paulawilliams44 on Twitter, on Facebook, on Goodreads, Visit paulawilliamswriter.co.uk and paulawilliamswriter.wordpress.com
Buy Rough and Deadly
Everyone knows Abe Compton’s Headbender cider is as rough as a cider can get. But is it deadly?
When self-styled ‘lady of the manor’, Margot Duckett-Trimble, announces she wouldn’t be seen dead drinking the stuff, who could have foreseen that, only a few days later, she’d be found, face down, in a vat of it?
Kat Latcham’s no stranger to murder. Indeed, the once ‘sleepy’ Somerset village of Much Winchmoor is fast gaining a reputation as the murder capital of the West Country and is ‘as sleepy as a kid on Christmas Eve’ when it’s discovered there’s a murderer running loose in the community again.
Kat has known Abe all her life, and she is sure that, although he had motive, he didn’t kill Margot. But as she investigates, the murderer strikes again. And the closer Kat gets to finding out who the real killer is, the closer to danger she becomes.
This second Much Winchmoor mystery is once again spiked with humour and sprinkled with romance – plus a cast of colourful characters, including a manic little dog called Prescott whose bite is definitely worse than his bark.
This is the second book in the Much Winchmoor mystery series. Think Midsomer Murders or Agatha Raisin. I haven't read the first, but didn't feel as if I needed to, this can absolutely be read as a standalone novel.
Kat Latcham has got herself a reputation for snooping around and solving crimes, so it's no surprise when she puts herself right in the middle of the suspicious death of a local woman. There are plenty of suspects floating around because the victim was the worst kind of snob. Her death isn't a surprise, but the main suspect certainly is. Kat wants to prove his innocence and it's the perfect opportunity to convince the local rag she writes for to give her a permanent position.
She can't afford to be picky seeing as she is a grown woman who has had to move back in with her parents. Back in her old room with no money, a lot of debt and no real job per se. To make it worse her only form of transport is the bike she used as a teenager. It's fair to say she has no street cred in her village.
This is definitely the type of read you want to grab when you need a break from the more tense, violent and graphic crime reads. The combination of humour, crime and a wee bit of romance creates a rather amusing and pleasant read.
It's a cosy mystery with a lot of snark and a cast of delightfully eccentric and colourful characters. For me the real indicator of a good read, as it will be for other readers, is whether I would go out and buy more books by the author. In this case I definitely would, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Williams to readers of this genre.
Buy Rough and Deadly at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Crooked Cat Books; pub date 30 April 2019. Buy at Amazon com.
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