Swarm Season: The Honeycombe Bay Mysteries, #2

Twenty thousand bees went over the hedge. Following them was the worst idea she ever had.

When one of Verity Penhale's colonies swarms in June, she does not chase it. She stands in a Cornish field with a saucer of syrup and a compass and works out where it has gone — two bearings, a pencil, and a triangle on a map.

The triangle is in the wrong place. It is a mile and three quarters west, on a headland with nothing on it but rabbits, a burying ground and Wrackmoor Light: a decommissioned lighthouse where a caretaker has been living alone for four years under a name that belongs to somebody else.

And in the dry stone cistern beside the tower, nine feet from a public footpath, there is a body that has been there six weeks — found because honeybees drink, and because a supply with no source is the one thing Verity Penhale has never in her life been able to walk past.

The police have a man in custody who admits everything except who he is. A heritage charity has ninety-one thousand pounds of grant money that bought nothing at all. And somewhere in four lever-arch files of immaculate paperwork is a single sheet with the wrong initials on it, signed under a condition printed in six-point type that nobody has read since 2009.

Swarm Season is the second Honeycombe Bay Mystery: a British village whodunnit with no gore, no bad language and a closed bedroom door — and a sleuth who solves murders the way she used to catch fraud, one entry at a time.

Perfect for readers of Richard Osman, M. C. Beaton and Agatha Christie.

Each Honeycombe Bay Mystery is a complete case and can be read on its own.