About this book
In the sleepy Cotswolds village of Little Bramley, nothing ever happens — until the morning after the Harvest Supper, when property developer Hugo Pemberton is found dead in the village hall. He had spent six months threatening to fell the village's four-hundred-year-old yew tree and build luxury flats on the grazing meadow, and he had made an enemy of nearly everyone in the village. The cordial he drank was poisoned with yew berries — from the very tree he wanted to destroy. Mabel Finch, seventy-one, retired headmistress and owner of the second-hand bookshop The Dusty Jacket, is determined to clear the name of Daisy Hart, the young waitress who served the fatal drink. Mabel has a gift no detective can match: after forty years of reading the village's handwriting in parish magazines and post-office notices, she recognises it the way other people recognise faces. Following a trail of torn parish records, a dead man's notebook, and a single note written in the margin of an old book, Mabel must unmask the killer before the village tears itself apart.