The Wonderland Murders by Millie Ravensworth - #bookreview #blogtour

 

The message on Penny's phone had read:

Nana Lem's been taken to St Agnes' Hospital. She's asked for you. It's critical. Come quickly.

Of course, Penny had to go. Firstly, there was that word 'critical'. Secondly, Nana Lem, her last surviving and definitely favourite grandparent, had asked for her. Thirdly, the message had come from Penny's cousin, Izzy... Fourthly, given that Penny's job at a London hotel had recently come to a crashing end (for reasons she did not want to go into), she was very much at a loose end.

***

A quirky and funny series for fans of a good mystery and compelling characters. Can you solve the crime before our dressmaking duo?

After losing her job at an exclusive London hotel, Penny Slipper is only too happy to help when her grandma asks her to take charge at the Cozy Craft sewing shop in charming rural Suffolk.

With cousin Izzy on hand as the expert dressmaker and Penny’s head for business, what can possibly go wrong?

But Penny’s in town for less than a day when the local librarian is poisoned and Penny fears she might even be accidentally responsible. Penny and Izzy are forced to turn detectives to uncover the true cause of death, while finishing a costume commission for their first customer.

Matters take a further deadly turn when a second body is discovered.

Can Penny and Izzy unpick the mysteries of the past and sew the pieces of this puzzle together before it’s too late?

***

This is the first in a four part series of books set in the Cozy Craft sewing shop. Being relatively nifty with a needle and thread myself I was instantly attracted to a book set in craft environment.

It was a fun book to read, full of eccentric characters. Penny and Izzy are the main characters and they complement one another very well. Penny is level headed and is the perfect foil for Izzy's, often outlandish ideas.

There are some lovely characters in this book, not all of them human. Arabella, the poetry loving pig, features just as much as some of the other secondary characters. I loved the name of the farmer, Stuart Dinktrout, and the book is littered with similar things, suggesting this is going to be fun from the very start.

It has all of the components that a reader would expect to find in a cosy crime mystery. At the beginning I thought I would work out who the murderer was quite quickly. However, the 'whodunnit' aspect kept me in the dark until the very end.

This made for a nice easy read and had I had time it could have been read in a single sitting.

ISBN:  979 8374205138

Publisher:  Independently published

Formats:  e-book and paperback

No. of Pages:  250 (paperback)

About the Authors:

Millie Ravensworth isn’t just one writer but two! The Millie Ravensworth books are the product of long-term collaborators Heide Goody and Iain Grant. Heide and Iain have been writing together for more than a decade. Together they have written various comedy novels and, in recent years, have written the Sam Applewhite series of comedy crime novels.

In their own words: “There are a number of reasons why we did this but part of the reason is because of the algorithms Amazon uses to identify what books readers might like. Not everyone who reads one series by us will necessarily like books we've written in another series. Therefore, to avoid confusing the AI algorithms and to avoid disappointing some readers, we've written the latest batch of books under the pseudonym of Millie Ravensworth,” said Iain.

“We write other books under our own names but they’re nothing like the Millie Ravensworth books,” said Heide. “The fifth book in the Cozy Craft series is coming out in the middle of May and we hope to have book six written soo

n too. I hope people will continue to enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy writing them.”

(book courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)