Ben's wedding was due to begin in twelve minutes and the church was a fifteen-minute drive away. She put her foot down a little harder on the accelerator and prayed that there would be no tractors around when she pulled out onto the country lane leading out of Malvern End. Jude hated being late for anything. She'd always taken pride in her punctuality and yet she knew that it would take a small miracle for her to arrive at the wedding on time...
***
Lambing season always brings the unexpected… But no one expected murder
Jude Gray never thought she’d find herself widowed and running a working farm full-time, but here she is, living in the small Malvern village her husband Adam spent most of his life in.
After a particularly gruelling lambing season, she is looking forward to some time off, but there’s no rest for the wicked, especially when she finds the body of one of Adam’s oldest friends on her farm.
Jude refuses to believe the official line, that Sarah’s death was a suicide, and starts an investigation of her own. But as the body count rises, danger creeps ever closer to Malvern Farm.
A killer is on the prowl. And all that stands in their way is one woman – and her dog.
***
I love a good mystery that keeps me guessing, and I did not predict the murderer until the reveal in this book.
This is a cosy mystery, where we meet the main character, Jude, as well as her family and friends. Jude is a woman whose husband passed away, leaving her to run the family farm alone. She has an employee, Noah, to help her but this is not how Jude imagined her life being. When her best friend dies on the farm and the police attribute her death to suicide, Jude decides to investigate her death as she does not believe that she would have taken her own life. This all serves to demonstrate Jude's strength of character and loyalty and the author does a great job of bringing her to life on the page.
We also meet DS Binita Khatri (Binnie) who was a good character in her own right and I would have liked her to have had a larger role in the book. It was easy to recognise that Jude was getting in over her head and it made me want to pull Binnie into the story all the more.
That said, this was an excellent story, full of twists and turns to keep the reader guessing.
There was much to like about this book. A good mystery, a cute child, sheep dogs and a lamb called Pancake.
I do hope that the author will write a sequel to this book as there is plenty of scope here to write more about Jude. I recommend this book.
ISBN: 978 1785134210
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Formats: e-book, audio, hardback and paperback (currently available on Kindle Unlimited)
No. of Pages: 344 (paperback)
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Kate Wells is the author of a number of well-reviewed books for children, and is now writing a new cosy crime series set in the Malvern hills, inspired by the farm where she grew up.
(ARC and all media info courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)
(all opinions are my own)
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