FREE JAMES CLATTERBRIDGE NOVELLA
Read a free digital copy of Murder as a Matter of Taste.
There are worse places to live than Abbey Marina. The boats bob, the geese honk at all hours, and the neighbours know each other's business rather too well – which is generally a comfort, and occasionally a problem.
It becomes a problem the evening James Clatterbridge – horror writer, houseboat dweller, and regular customer of the marina's fish and chip van – finds Molly Whitcombe dead beside her fryer.
Getting Cosy - The James Clatterbridge Mysteries
The books written for the legions of cosy murder mystery fans are collectively called: The James Clatterbridge Mysteries
Abbey Marina sits on Abbey Waters in Bedfordshire, a small, eccentric community of houseboats and narrowboats tucked away from the world. James Clatterbridge is a horror writer in his early fifties who lives there with his wife Inky on Houseboat Number 7, Pontoon Pike.
James is a man who navigates the marina on his beloved mobility scooter Rocinante, makes his living from writing horror stories, and finds himself – with a regularity that would not entirely surprise him – drawn into the real thing.
Sharp, contrary, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a puzzle alone, James brings to each investigation the same quality of attention he brings to his fiction: an instinct for character, a taste for argument, and a cheerful willingness to construct elaborate theories that his more methodical, more sceptical wife will then take apart – a process he anticipates, accepts, and repeats without apparent remorse.
The Clatterbridge Mystery series is set in the heart of England, rooted in the rhythms of close-knit community life – the pub quiz, the allotment, the summer barbecue, the neighbour whose past doesn't quite add up – and in the uncomfortable truth that the quietest places have the most to hide.
Murder as a Working Hypothesis
A body in the rhubarb patch was not part of the plan.
When Inky finds a body concealed in the rhubarb patch of their allotment on Ouse Allotments, James Clatterbridge's quiet new life at Abbey Marina begins to unravel rather faster than he'd intended. The dead man, a rough sleeper known around the marina as G, seemed harmless enough when he was alive; the police think they have the case more or less in hand. Unfortunately, the murder weapon appears to be James's missing dibber, which makes him, technically, a suspect. Murder as a Working Hypothesis is the first full-length Clatterbridge mystery: a story of allotment politics, environmental crime, and the uncomfortable discovery that virtue and monstrousness are not always mutually exclusive.