The Only Way Is Blackmail

Bonfire Night. A dead cat-show judge. And the village has already found its guy.

Everybody heard the row. Everybody knows who did it. Lucinda Thornfield, the woman they’re blaming, hasn’t even bothered to argue. She doesn’t need to. Speckled Hill has a feud, an angry exit and a ginger cat, and apparently that’s all the evidence anyone requires.

Chloe Essex, who found the body at the bottom of the garden, isn’t convinced. Not when her mother turns up uninvited, refuses to say why, and was seen down there before the fireworks.

Todd says it’s a police matter. But somebody in Speckled Hill has spent years collecting secrets. Now the interest is due. Chloe has to find what the villagers missed before its convenient verdict puts her mother in a cell.

The Only Way Is Blackmail is Book 5 of the Chloe Essex Cozy Mysteries, a humorous British village series with a fair-play puzzle and a Bonfire Night that goes badly wrong.

Back to Speckled Hill, where nothing stays private and somebody’s been keeping the receipts.

Readers who enjoy Richard Osman, M.C. Beaton and Faith Martin will feel right at home.