Meet Eve Mallow, obituary writer… and amateur sleuth? @bookouture

I’m excited to say that the first in my new Eve Mallow series, Mystery on Hidden Lane, is up for pre-order today! It’s just 99p/99c on Amazon Kindle, though if you’d prefer a paperback, you’ll be able to order/buy that from the same page shortly before publication day, 30th January 2020.

I got the idea for my heroine, Eve, after listening to a fascinating interview with Margalit Fox, who wrote obituaries for the New York Times. It got me thinking about the unique insight people in that profession must get when interviewing a dead person’s friends and family. It seemed like the ideal job for an amateur sleuth!

Here’s the cover:

And here’s the reader description:

Meet Eve Mallow: an American far from home, a professional busybody… and an amateur detective?

Seasoned obituary writer Eve Mallow has a new assignment: to tell the life story of famed musician Bernard Fitzpatrick. A chance to spend a few days in the sweet little village of Saxford St Peter, walking the country lanes with her beloved dachshund Gus and meeting new people sounds like a dream. But it turns out that Bernard’s life was much less interesting than his death. On the day she arrives, news breaks that the charismatic cellist was the victim of a grisly murder. Could this quaint English village be hiding a dark secret?

As Eve starts to interview Bernard’s friends and colleagues, she finds that he’d ruffled a few feathers. In fact, from the keepers of the Cross Keys Inn to his own staff at High House, there’s barely a person in town who doesn’t have some reason to hate him… is one of the friendly villagers a cold-blooded killer?

Eve hoped Saxford St Peter would be the perfect escape from her busy city life. But there is darkness even in the most sunlit of settings. And when a second body is found, Eve becomes certain that one of the people she’s met must be the murderer. She has never done any detective work before… but is there something in her notes that can crack the case?

An unputdownable page-turner, perfect for fans of Faith Martin, Agatha Christie and Betty Rowlands.

Books two and three in the series are due out in March and June 2020.

A flavour of the Eve Mallow series

For anyone who knows Suffolk, I’ve created a fictional village – Saxford St Peter – for the series, but I’ve pinched elements of Blythburgh, Dunwich and Walberswick. The pub in the slideshow above is the wonderful White Hart Inn in Blythburgh.