The Wrong Prescription

A dying woman. A tidy packet of tablets. And a label with the chemist's own initials on it. Autumn comes early to Harkerdale, and Bea Calvert has survived her first year as the village pharmacist. Then a grieving sister sets a half-used blister pack on the counter of the Old Dispensary and says the words that will take Bea's winter apart: these aren't what she were on. Margaret Ayrton was seventy-one, a retired district nurse, and dying anyway. Nobody questioned her death. There was no post-mortem. She was cremated three weeks ago. And the tablets in her packet are not the tablets on the label: a label printed in Bea's shop, in Bea's typeface, with Bea's own initials in the corner. Bea can see what nobody else in the dale can: that the score line is a fraction wrong, that the marking belongs to a medicine discontinued years ago, and that somebody fed it to a dying woman twice a day for seven weeks and let her illness take the blame. Proving it is another matter. There is no body, no case, and no police officer in North Yorkshire who can open one. Worse, the health authority's inspectors are already on their way to decide whether Brackenbeck keeps its only chemist for fifteen miles, and every step Bea takes towards the truth is a step towards proving her own shop handed out the wrong tablets. When a second patient up the dale begins to fail in exactly the same way, Bea has days, not weeks. Because one death is an illness. Two is a hand. The Wrong Prescription is the second Brackenbeck Mystery: a warm, wry, fair-play village whodunnit set among the drystone walls and rust bracken of the Yorkshire Dales, for readers who like their murders quiet, their clues honest and their tea strong.