The Ashworth Affair

A dead lord. A fifty-three-year-old murder. And the only investigators he trusted were six retirees with a mobility scooter and a flask full of emergency sequins. When Violet Hartwell receives a letter sealed with a raven holding a key — not the Ashworth family crest, but something far more personal — she knows immediately that Lord Albert Ashworth didn't just leave a mystery. He left a design. At ninety-seven, he died knowing exactly who killed Paul Fenn on a cold December morning in 1972. He simply chose to tell the right people, in the right way, at the right time. That time is now. And those people are them. The Sunset Manor Detective Agency travels to Ashworth Manor in Northumbria — a magnificent, brooding pile of secrets and structural plumbing disasters — to unravel a conspiracy that spans Edinburgh, Bruges, Geneva, and five decades of silence. What begins as a single death on a poorly lit staircase opens into something far larger: a government cover-up, a falsified intelligence operation, seventeen soldiers who died for a lie, and a set of original documents that someone has spent half a century making sure would never be found. Violet follows the evidence with her customary precision. Ray builds an evidentiary chain that would make Scotland Yard weep with envy. Agnes discovers a book cipher scratched into a plaster wall, a crucial calling card tucked behind a tapestry, and a cataloguing system in Hexham that nearly derails the entire investigation. Dolores reconnects with a ninety-two-year-old Belgian document expert in Bruges over genever at eleven in the morning. Viktor plays chess with a dead man's strategy and wins. And Frank, deprived of The Interceptor but never of ingenuity, transforms a modest rental scooter into something that should probably require a maritime licence. The Ashworth Affair is a cozy mystery about the weight of truth, the patience of justice, and what it means when the right people finally show up — warm, witty, and armed with magnifying glasses, lockpicks, and rather a lot of shortbread. They were his first and only choice. He trusted them to finish the game. They did.