Death at the Village Show

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The cake judge meant to tell the truth at four o'clock. At half past twelve she was dead. A MIDGE ALDERTON MYSTERY · BOOK TWO A parcel turns up behind the water tank in the village hall loft, postmarked Wexham Staithe, December 1998, and addressed to the cake judge of the Winter Show. Midge Alderton, seventy-nine, retired postmistress and secret setter of the Saturday cryptic crossword, knows the initials beside the postmark. They are hers. She took that parcel over her own counter, from a man she was fond of, and failed. Inside is a letter from Frank Rix, the old hall caretaker, who left the village in disgrace that winter, accused of stealing the prize money. It says the Show's winning Christmas cakes were baked in the judge's own bakery. The judge is still judging. And on Show day she means to stand up at the prize-giving and tell the whole village the truth. At half past twelve she is found dead at the foot of a loft ladder she could never have climbed, and somebody has moved the winner's rosette. With her lodger the village GP, her pigeon-fearing greyhound Biscuit, and a detective sergeant who has started coming round for coffee on Saturdays, Midge follows a trail of gold-headed pins, frost on a windscreen, a holly leaf with one berry too many, and a twenty-eight-year-old bank slip, to put right a wrong she should have questioned long ago. • A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery set in present-day north Norfolk in the run-up to Christmas. • No sex, no swearing, and the death happens off the page. • Book two of the Midge Alderton Mysteries; reads on its own.