‘The Body at the Windmill’ by Kate Hardy

Published by Storm Publishing,
7 January 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-83700274-0 (PB)

When Georgina’s cleaner Jodie receives a call from her son Harry’s school, saying that he is unwell, Georgina offers to drive her to Great Wenborough Windmill to collect Harry who was on a school trip doing Victorian studies. In this instance how grain used to be milled in the old days and turned into flour. 

When they arrive at the five-storey windmill, it is not just Harry who is ill but most of the class and teachers. They assume it is nasty bug, but it is eventually traced to chicken sausage rolls provided to the children. Suspicion eventually falls on the mill owner Louise Wilkins, who had spent a year restoring it. Then Georgie’s Springer spaniel Bert also goes down with poisoning after eating a sausage roll.

The added news from Jodie the following morning that the teacher Miss Hurst had died last night prompts Georgie to get to the bottom of these poisonings. 

When later talking to her friend Sybbie she learns that a dead rat was found in the grain.  Is someone trying to frame Louise and cause difficulties for her new business?  Doing some research, Georgina discovered that in the early 1800’s there were more than 400 windmills across the country, most of them demolished or derelict. Further information from Cesca, Sybbie’s daughter is that Louise has been experiencing problems over the last few months when people have been spreading rumours. Silly stuff, about odd happenings and an old story about a mad miller who murdered someone years ago. 

While no nonsense DI Colin Bradshaw, Georgina other half follows up on the poisonings. Georgina decides to contact her friend, Doris, the ghost of an eighteen-year-old girl who had died after a fall down the stairs at Rockery Farm more than half a century ago and is now Georgina’s home, and who might have some insight into the matter. Delving into the mill’s dark history she uncovers a chilling parallel.  Over a century earlier, the miller’s daughter Margaret Chorley was accused of poisoning a local family with arsenic-laced flour and was hanged in 1845. Could someone for reasons unknown be following the Victorian case as a blueprint for a modern-day murder?  Or has someone got it in for Louise Wilkins? 

As the poisoning continues, can Georgina solve the mystery of the current day poisoner? 

A tantalising mystery and intriguing mystery. Recommended.
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Reviewer: Lizzie Sirett

Kate Hardy has written for as long as she can remember; it started with stories about ponies and dogs, moved into ghosts and history, and then into local history and romance. She's won three Romantic Novelists' Association awards for her romantic fiction - and is thoroughly enjoying her new life of crime! She lives in Norwich with her husband, two grown-up children, two spaniels and too many books to count. When she's not writing or researching, she'll be out at a gig or the theatre, at ballet class, doing cross-stitch, taking photographs of the sunrise while persuading the spaniels to stay still for one second, fossicking around on a beach or in archives, or exploring ancient buildings. She loves learning new things, which is why you'll always discover something different in a Kate Hardy book. Oh - and, like her heroine Georgina Drake, Kate's deaf but doesn't let it hold her back in any way.