Sugar the Pill

The sweetest woman in Brackenbeck has made every wedding cake in the dale for forty years. She will not live to ice the next one. Spring has come to the Yorkshire Dales: lambs on the fell, primroses on the churchyard wall and a wedding at St Oswald's on Easter Monday. Bea Calvert has been asked to check the menu, because the groom has a nut allergy and the bride wants it done properly, by the chemist. Then, at the church tea on Mothering Sunday, Joyce Kettlewell, retired headmistress, churchwarden and everybody's Auntie Joyce, collapses in front of half the parish. Her lips swell, her voice goes, and nothing the doctor does can bring her back. A wasp, says the dale. A nut in the Bakewell tart, says the local paper. And then the paper finds a better story: the tablets Joyce was taking for her shaking hands, prescribed by the village doctor and dispensed by the village chemist. With an inspector in her shop, her freehold due at Easter and the man she has only just let herself love standing beside her in the headlines, Bea has to find out what was really in the thing that killed Joyce Kettlewell, and who knew the one allergy everyone else had forgotten. A six-year-old flower girl has already told her. Nobody was listening. Sugar the Pill is the fourth Brackenbeck Mystery: a warm, wry, fairly clued spring whodunnit set in a Yorkshire Dales village, with a pharmacist sleuth, a disapproving old terrier, a slow-burn romance and absolutely no gore. It can be read on its own.