The bookshop comes with a cat. The cottage comes with a ghost. The village comes with a body in the garden.
Cleo Marchmont travelled to her great-aunt’s Sussex cottage for a funeral.
She did not expect the cat.
She did not expect the ghost.
She really did not expect the dead woman at the bottom of the garden steps.
When Cleo arrives in Firlestone for a quiet week of cottage-clearing, she gets an opinionated tabby called Boswell who is choosing her against her better judgement, and a Great-Aunt Vivienne who has been waiting eighteen months for someone to talk to.
Then the village’s most disliked resident is found dead at the foot of her own garden steps.
The constable is content to call it a tragic fall.
Vivienne, with one raised eyebrow, is not.
A scone still warm on the counter. A kettle on a low heat. A bone-coloured hairpin in the gravel.
Cleo has four days to catch a killer, pack the cottage, and post the keys back to the solicitor. Someone in this village has already noticed she is asking too many questions.
And in her bag are the keys to a struggling Bloomsbury bookshop she has not yet seen.
The First Edition is the standalone prequel novella to The Bloomsbury Bookshop Mysteries. For readers of Lucy Connelly, Verity Bright, and Jackie Baldwin.
