A Bitter Pill

A whole dale that loved to fear him. A heart everyone knew would give out. And a village chemist who can see that the dose doesn't fit the death. When Bea Calvert comes home to the Yorkshire Dales to keep the only chemist's shop for fifteen miles from closing, she means to do her year, steady her hands after the city, and decide later whether she's staying for good. Then, at the height of the Harkerdale Show, the man who's ruled it for twenty-two years drops dead in the produce tent, and the whole dale agrees it was only his bad heart, on a hot day, doing what everyone always said it would. Bea is the one person in Brackenbeck who can see that it wasn't. Because the dose in the body doesn't match the dose on the prescription, and a pharmacist knows a number like that doesn't go wrong by itself. With her own shop suddenly under suspicion, a sceptical detective who thinks she's playing at sleuthing, a dry, principled village doctor she can't quite stop noticing, and a grizzled one-eyed terrier with strong opinions, Bea starts reading the dale the way she reads a patient, by its medicines. A grasping developer. An ambitious deputy. A disowned son. A covered-up death forty-five years gone. And, beneath all of it, the kindest, most trusted soul in the village, who has been keeping a secret she'd already paid for with the whole of her life. If you love warm, witty, fair-play whodunnits set in a British village, a clever amateur sleuth, a glorious Dales setting, a slow-burn romance and absolutely no gore, pull a chair up to the stove. You'll not want to leave Brackenbeck. A Bitter Pill is the first Brackenbeck Mystery: a complete, satisfying murder mystery with no cliffhanger, and the start of a cosy series to settle into for a very long while. Mind the dose. Trust the dog. And never tell the chemist your symptoms unless you mean it.