BRAND NEW instalment in the page-turning Armstrong & Oscar cosy mystery series, this time in the snowy Italian Alps.
A festive gathering…
Private investigator Dan Armstrong, accompanied by his wife and his canine sidekick, Oscar, are spending the days before Christmas in a luxurious Alpine chalet tucked away in a hidden valley. It
should be the perfect escape, except the owner is in fear for his life.
A house full of secrets…
Amid perfect winter wonderland scenery, the more Dan discovers about his host and the other guests, he realises that all is not as it seems. What should be a happy family party is riddled with rancour, mistrust and hatred.
A killer in the snow?
Then the snow falls – fast and heavy – and within moments, someone is dead. Accident, suicide, or murder? As the snow closes in, Dan has to work out if he’s looking for a killer, or whether he and
Oscar are barking up the wrong tree.
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I’m a man. And a pretty old man as well. I studied languages at Nottingham University a long time ago and then lived and worked in France and Switzerland before going to work in Italy for seven years. My Italian wife and I then came back to the UK with our little daughter (now long-since grown up) where I ran a big English language school for many years. We now live in a sleepy little village in Devonshire. I’ve been writing almost all my life but it was only 13 years ago that I finally managed to find a publisher who liked my work enough to offer me my first contract.
I started off writing romances but after 28 of them, I knew I wanted to try something different, and so the first of the Armstrong and Oscar cozy mysteries, Murder in Tuscany, was born three years ago.
I’ve been having a lot of fun ever since getting to know the dynamic duo (and introducing them to people all over the world). These books are cosy crime [a genre I didn’t even know existed when I
started writing them). They are murder mysteries, but not gory, over-violent stuff, but stories designed to exercise the brain of the reader and to put a smile on their face. Maybe it’s because there are so many horrible things happening in the world today that I feel I need to do my best to
provide something to cheer my readers up. My books provide escapism to some gorgeous locations all over my beloved Italy.
My thoughts: It does feel a bit silly to be reading a Christmas set book in the middle of a heatwave, but my longing for cooler weather was more than satisfied by the snow Dan and Oscar (encountering it for the first time, delightful) find themselves in in Piedmont, in the Italian Alps.
Invited, along with Anna, to visit a somewhat paranoid man by their famous actress friend Selena, they find themselves in a beautiful mansion in a secluded valley high above the world. The owner, a man whose family business makes skiwear and other sporting goods, believes his business partner was murdered, and that he must be next.
But who could want him dead? His children? His brother? An employee? It’s a strange one, even for Dan, and he’s unsure how seriously to take it. But then as snow falls, someone dies and suddenly there’s a need to investigate. Someone has been embezzling from the company – could this be a motive?
Dan needs to solve this one quickly, he and Anna are due to spend Christmas with her daughter, can Oscar (and his new pal Winston) help Dan figure it all out before anything else happens?
Well, you’ll have to read it to answer the questions, but I will say the ending was very satisfying, Oscar is a hero on four paws and I enjoyed every page.
*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 