The Author Who Knew Too Much
(2026)(The sixth book in the Braunton Book Club Mystery series)
A novel by Morgan Isaac
Braunton has waited forty years for somebody famous to come home. It should have been careful what it wished for.
Cordelia Chase has sold eleven million crime novels and has not set foot in North Devon since the day she left it. Now she is headlining the village’s first literary weekend, run out of Nina Bell’s café on a budget Nina has guaranteed herself. And she has brought the unpublished manuscript of her thirty-first novel with her.
Braunton is in it. The café is in it. So is a girl who left the village one August and never came back.
Twenty minutes before her reading, Cordelia shuts herself in the vestry of St Brannock’s, as she has done before every public appearance for thirty years. Nobody knocks. Nobody goes in. By ten to six she is dead, the manuscript has gone, and one page of it has been left on the table where it was certain to be found.
The village reads that page and reaches the obvious conclusion. Somebody local wanted her silenced.
The Tuesday night book club is not so sure. Judith Pender has read every novel Cordelia Chase ever wrote, most of them twice, and Judith has noticed something nobody else in the church was bookish enough to notice.
Because the question is not who hated her. It is who had already read the ending.
The Author Who Knew Too Much is the sixth Braunton Book Club Mystery: a warm, witty, puzzle-led cozy mystery for readers who like their murders clever rather than grim, and their detectives armed with nothing more dangerous than a good memory and a second slice of cake. Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, M.C. Beaton, Faith Martin and Death in Paradise.
Tuesday night was for cake, crime fiction, and occasionally, actual murder.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Cordelia Chase has sold eleven million crime novels and has not set foot in North Devon since the day she left it. Now she is headlining the village’s first literary weekend, run out of Nina Bell’s café on a budget Nina has guaranteed herself. And she has brought the unpublished manuscript of her thirty-first novel with her.
Braunton is in it. The café is in it. So is a girl who left the village one August and never came back.
Twenty minutes before her reading, Cordelia shuts herself in the vestry of St Brannock’s, as she has done before every public appearance for thirty years. Nobody knocks. Nobody goes in. By ten to six she is dead, the manuscript has gone, and one page of it has been left on the table where it was certain to be found.
The village reads that page and reaches the obvious conclusion. Somebody local wanted her silenced.
The Tuesday night book club is not so sure. Judith Pender has read every novel Cordelia Chase ever wrote, most of them twice, and Judith has noticed something nobody else in the church was bookish enough to notice.
Because the question is not who hated her. It is who had already read the ending.
The Author Who Knew Too Much is the sixth Braunton Book Club Mystery: a warm, witty, puzzle-led cozy mystery for readers who like their murders clever rather than grim, and their detectives armed with nothing more dangerous than a good memory and a second slice of cake. Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, M.C. Beaton, Faith Martin and Death in Paradise.
Tuesday night was for cake, crime fiction, and occasionally, actual murder.
Genre: Cozy Mystery