Ding Dong Bell (The Woodstock Mysteries, #1)

Woodstock, March 1950. Jean Penrose, a young tutor at Woodstock House, is found drowned in Fair Rosamund's Well on the grounds of Blenheim Palace. The police call it an accident. Hester Croft calls it murder.

Jean was clever, beautiful, and cruel — a collector of secrets who played games with the people around her. Now she's dead, and half of Woodstock had reason to want her that way.

Hester Croft, a sharp-minded woman with a dark past of her own, and her oldest friend Gertie Bundle, the irrepressible landlady of The Old Pyed Bull Inn, begin asking questions the police won't. But in a town preparing for the Palace's grand public opening, powerful people want this matter closed — quickly and quietly.

As Hester and Gertie pull at the threads of Jean's little games, they discover that the secrets she kept weren't just scandalous. They were dangerous. And the person who silenced her isn't finished yet.

But Jean's death has stirred something in Hester too. Old memories, a family darkness she has spent thirty years trying to outrun. To find the killer, she may have to confront the one thing she fears most. Herself.

Ding Dong Bell is the first mystery in the Woodstock Mysteries series — cosy crime with a sharp edge, set in 1950s Oxfordshire.