‘The Antique Store Detective and the May Day Murder’ by Clare Chase

Published by Bookuture,
14 January 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-83525-289-5 (PB)

The friendly but efficient village bobby is a dying breed these days – but who needs him when you’ve got Bella Winter, antiques dealer and part-time detective, and a whole posse of her friends to hunt down the local criminal fraternity? Who was it who said it takes a village to solve a crime?

Not only hunt them down; Bella’s detecting skills are so sharply honed that she can spot a murder even when the coroner’s verdict is a firm Natural Causes. The advantage, of course, is that the police – the real police, based in a large town miles away – are happy to leave her to it. The disadvantage is that she can’t tap into their information sources. Except she can, since she has a convenient godfather who happens to be a retired cop.  

To begin at the beginning. During a traditional May Day Walk, Bella and her friends see a local ne’er-do-well leave a little doll stuck with pins beside a sacred well. It’s done up to resemble Mary Roberts, highly efficient school secretary and the ne’er-do-well’s nemesis – and Mary’s lifeless body is discovered a few hours later. The verdict is a heart attack, but Bella doesn’t believe it. Despite the police’s best efforts, she determinedly believes Mary was scared to death. There are plenty of suspects, so she sets out to prove one of them guilty.

The investigation which follows is littered with eccentric characters on both sides. To name just a handful: on the side of the angels is Bella herself, well known in the vicinity for her vintage dress sense. She’s very much her father’s daughter; Dad was the last village copper, both popular and perceptive. Jeannie the pub landlady, large, loud and matriarch to a large family of sons, knows everyone in town. Opal, the mysterious woman of the woods, lives mainly in the shadows. On the darker side there’s Noah, teenage tearaway with a grudge against the victim. Shane, her ex-husband, still stings from the public humiliation Mary delivered when she caught him in flagrante. Adrian, the local headmaster, has far too high an opinion of himself.

There’s plenty of local colour in the form of feuds, traditions and pretty buildings, all of which contribute to a strong sense of community. The May Day murder is already the second case for Bella to investigate; no doubt there will be more, and yet another pretty semi-rural area will become a dangerous place to visit. Long may it continue so!
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Clare Chase writes classic mysteries. Her aim is to take readers away from it all via some armchair sleuthing in atmospheric locations. Like her heroines, Clare is fascinated by people and what makes them tick. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked in settings as diverse as Littlehey Prison and the University of Cambridge, in her home city. She’s lived everywhere from the house of a lord to a slug-infested flat and finds the mid-terrace she currently occupies a good happy medium. As well as writing, Clare loves family time, art and architecture, cooking, and of course, reading other people’s books.

www.clarechase.com

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.