With her Curiosity Shop open for business, Alice Carroll is finally settling into life in the picturesque Cotswold village of Little Pride. But then her old life comes knocking…
Alice’s ex boyfriend, Steven, who dumped her to travel the world, has run out of money and asks Alice to sell off his collection of chess sets.
Alice decides to host a tournament to showcase the boards, and her plan seems to be working. That is, until chess pieces begin to mysteriously disappear. And when a body is discovered outside the
tournament, Alice realises that the victim was a pawn in another, far more dangerous game.
As the host of the event, Alice is eager to help the police investigate. She doesn’t know why anyone would be interested in stealing random chess pieces, let alone willing to kill for them, but she’s determined to find out. Can she solve the case before someone else gets hurt?
Or will this be one gambit too far for Alice?
Debbie Young writes warm, witty, feel-good contemporary fiction inspired by life in the English village where she lives with her Scottish husband and their teenage daughter.
Her Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series begins with “Best Murder in Show” and the first seven books run the course of a calendar year in the life of a classic English Cotswold village. Originally
intended to be a seven-book series, further books will follow, due to reader demand.
She also writes the romantic comedy mystery series, Staffroom at St Bride’s, set in the staffroom of an English girls’ boarding school. The series will eventually be six books long, running the course of
an academic year, and the first book is “Secrets at St Bride’s”.
Her books were shortlisted in 2020 and 2021 for The Selfies Award, given to the best self-published adult fiction in the UK.
She also writes short stories and has published three themed collections, “Marry in Haste”, “Quick Change”, and “Stocking Fillers”, and had stories included in many anthologies.
When she’s not writing, she does other bookish things, such as speaking or reading her work at literary events, such as Crimefest, the leading international crime writing event, the Cheltenham
Literature Festival and the Hawkesbury Upton Literature Festival, the event that she founded for her local community.
She’s a member of the Society of Authors and the UK Ambassador for the Alliance of Independent Authors.
She loves reading, bellringing, singing in the local choir, gardening, knitting, sketching and travelling with her family in their camper van. Her many hobbies mean she is never short of ideas for her gentle tales of rural life.
Facebook: @DebbieYoungAuthor
Twitter: @DebbieYoungBN
Instagram: @debbieyoungauthor
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My thoughts: I was in the chess club at school, mostly because we could eat our lunches in the classroom and not have to brave the playground and the soaking wet foam footballs being violently kicked at you. Thankfully there were no murders.
When Alice decides to organise a showcase and auction to sell some of her ex-boyfriend’s chess sets, she certainly doesn’t expect it to end in death for one of the attendees. He was also stealing chess pieces, and not even from the more expensive, antique sets, but plastic replicas of the Isle of Lewis figures. Very strange.
And the case gets stranger, a man wanders into Alice’s shop in the middle of the night, and when she tries to locate the original seller of the set, she gets hung up on.
Clearly there’s more going on here than first appears, luckily there are clever local coppers on the case, as well as Alice and her friends. A bit of bellringing and a set up to catch the culprit. It’s all very action film in a country village! Great fun as always from Debbie Young.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 