I'm happy to welcome Rita Stonningto Cozy Up With Kathy today. You can find Rita on the pages of the The British Book Tour Mystery series by Emma Dakin. Crime in Cornwall is the second book in the series and was released last month.
I don’t know how I got into such a mess. I’m forty-six and I’ve spent the last twenty years dealing with authors: petulant, grandiose, demanding, humble, shy, angry and narcissistic. You’d think I would be alert and wise. But I wasn’t. I fell for Oliver Nott the way I fell for my first inappropriate loser in the sixth form. My father helped me out of that one. No one helped me with Oliver Nott.
“Proper barmy,” my husband Patrick called him.
Oliver was mad in a way, delving in to the research for his books, searching out facts to bolster the plot line, interviewing anyone who might know about the setting with the focused purpose of an archeologist. He was always looking for the next big plot, the next big sale. Very professional. I edited his work and he was wonderful to work with. He paid attention to my suggestions and told me how much better his finished product was because I’d worked on it. That was seductive. He was our best seller and I was proud to be associated with him. While Patrick didn’t like Oliver, he respected his sales potential. He never saw him as a rival.
For the first few months of our affair I was floating. I felt young and alive. Then, he became as I’d seen him become with other women and men— critical, sarcastic, demeaning. He wanted to tell Patrick about us. That confused me and put me in a terrible position. e wanste dto tell Patrick about us.I was thinking of how to end it with him when death made the decision. It would have been tragic if he’d died in a plane crash or a car crash. But murder puts a deferent patina on sorrow. The police looked for suspects and found me. I couldn’t blame them. I was the perfect suspect. To be honest, I wanted him out of my life. The police, that Detective Inspector Evans in particular, were looking at the degree to which I was willing to go to get him out of my life.
Then I saw him in the garden, dead—and I took his phone. All I could think of was the texts, the humiliating texts that were on that phone. Patrick must not read those. That put me into an even worse position.
Claire from next door came to see me, bringing her comforting dog, Gulliver. I cried and hugged Gulliver and Claire listened. I forgot that the inspector was her lover and it was unwise to tell her anything. She was such a good listener and I badly need someone to listen, so I told her. Now, I’m really in trouble.
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Rita Stonning is a minor character in the story, but she is Claire’s next-door neighbor and, certainly, she is in trouble. In Crime in Cornwall, Claire Barclay, the protagonist, discovers who murdered Oliver Nott.
If you would like to know more about The British Book Tour series go to my website emmadakinauthor.com and click on the Join My Newsletter button. I send out information once a month. If everything is working properly, and the gremlins that haunt computers are latent, you should get a free chapter of a book when you join.
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Crime in Cornwall (British Book tour Mysteries) by Emma Dakin
About Crime in Cornwall
Cozy Mystery 2nd in Series
Publisher: Camel Press (October 13, 2020)
Paperback: 228 pages
From AmazonPatrick and Rita Stonning, Claire’s neighbors in Ashton-on-Tinch, dash down from London on weekends to host loud parties. They work in a publishing house and use their Ashton semi-detached home as a break from big city stress. Patrick arrives at Claire’s door distraught, reporting one of his partygoers, Olive Nott a best-selling author, dead. Claire discovers that not only is he dead, he’s been murdered. Patrick is suspected of the murder and has enough motive to satisfy the police. Nott wrote mysteries set in Cornwall and had planned to take his lucrative contracts to a competing company. His latest book dealt with smuggling in the caves of Cornwall. The police, including DI Mark Evans from the newly formed Major investigations Team wonder if he learned too much from his research. Claire takes her six tourists, most from America, to the Cornwall coast in search of sites of mystery novels and hears the opinions of the Cornish people on smuggling. She asks Patrick to meet her in Penzance to give a guest lecture on the smuggling in Oliver Nott’s novels. Claire finds Patrick self-aggrandizing and arrogant but doesn’t agree he would murder and sets out to find the one responsible.
Claire Barclay is enthusiastic about her British Mystery Book Tour business. She enjoys taking her guests, usually from America, to the settings of mystery novels where bodies are long dead. Her neighbor's plea for help to deal with a recently murdered well-known author unsettles her. She leaves the body to the police and takes her guests to Cornwall, including a British tourist who far is too interested in the dead author.
About Emma Dakin
Emma Dakin lives in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. She has over twenty-five trade published books of mystery and adventure for teens and middle-grade children and non-fiction for teens and adults. Her love of the British countryside and villages and her addiction to cozy mysteries now keep her writing about characters who live and work in those villages. She introduces readers to the problems that disturb that idyllic setting.
Author Links:
Webpage/Blog emmadakinauthor.com
Facebook http://tiny.cc/ilk3az
Goodreads http://tiny.cc/ttk3az
Purchase Link - Amazon - B&N IndieBound
