MURDER AT THE MANOR BALL

The grandest ball of the season. A locked room. And one very determined lady with a Corgi and a great deal of patience for people who never tell the whole story.

When Lady Catherine Ashbury receives a cryptic note from the county's most controversial financier - promising a private word at the Hartwell Midsummer Ball about someone dear to her - she tucks it into her evening bag and goes, curious but unconcerned. What she does not expect is to spend the rest of the evening watching a man walk too carefully down a lamplit corridor, or to wake the next morning to news that he has been found dead in a locked library.

The local constable is satisfied. The doctor says heart. The village is already moving on.

Catherine is not.

As the proprietor of Elmsworth's beloved lending library, Lady Catherine has always been the sort of woman who notices things - a smudge on a window ledge, a sweet smell that has no business being there, a playing card left face-down on a library mantelpiece that most people walked straight past. She is not a detective. She is simply a woman who finds lies untidy, and this one has more of them than she can politely ignore.

But the more Catherine looks - at the six guests who each had reason to want Reginald Fawcett-Moore silenced, at the financial ruin quietly pressing on the manor's elegant walls, at the debts that had been binding a frightened young man to an impossible choice - the more the case refuses to be simple. A false alibi unravels in a billiard room. A flower press reveals more than pressed flowers. And the man Catherine is beginning to trust most in the world turns out to have his own reasons for keeping quiet.

What she finds at the end of it is not the triumphant solution of a detective story. It is something sadder, more human, and considerably harder to know what to do with.

Set in the honey-stoned villages of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds in the glittering, uneasy summer of 1923, Murder at the Manor Ball is a cozy mystery that takes its clues seriously, its characters warmly, and its tea very strong indeed.

If you love classic country-house mysteries, glamorous 1920s atmosphere, and sleuths who solve everything with intelligence rather than a badge - pour yourself a cup and turn the first page.

Murder at the Manor Ball is the second book in the Lady Catherine Ashbury Murder Mystery series and can be read as a complete standalone.