Death at the Christmas Fair

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Father Christmas died in his grotto before the raffle draw. Midge Alderton wants to see the stamp on the winning ticket. A MIDGE ALDERTON MYSTERY · BOOK FIVE In May, five Christmas cards arrive on Clifford Pegg's doormat, one every Monday, addressed in capitals his late wife taught. The village Father Christmas of twenty-two years gives up the grotto. Midge Alderton, eighty, retired postmistress and secret setter of the Saturday cryptic crossword, knows exactly where a letter waits: on a doormat in a shut shop. So this year there is a new Father Christmas. Max Tovell is a careful retired bank manager and the fair's new treasurer, and he has been counting fifteen years of raffle stubs. Each one carries Midge's old post office date stamp. The money doesn't add up, and four prize winners don't seem to exist. On the day of the Christmas fair, between one child and the next, Father Christmas takes a nip of mulled wine from his flask and dies in the vicarage chair. Everybody says it was his heart. Midge remembers a dent in a flask, a bay leaf that wasn't, and a winning ticket stamped with three letters where her stamp only ever printed two. With her lodger the village GP, her greyhound Biscuit and a detective sergeant who would like one quiet Christmas, Midge follows a raffle drum, fifteen years of parish magazines, a wreath the size of a bicycle wheel, and a crossword clue meant for one reader only. It all leads to a brazier in the churchyard on Christmas Eve. • A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery set in a present-day north Norfolk village from May to Christmas. • No sex, no swearing, and the death happens off the page. • The fifth and final Midge Alderton Mystery; reads on its own.