‘A Brush With Death’ by Fiona Leitch
Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker is back!
When a body turned up at her last catering gig it certainly put people off the hor d’oeuvres. So with a reputation to salvage, Jodie’s determined that her next job for the village’s festival will go without a hitch.
But when chaos breaks out, Jodie Parker somehow always finds herself in the picture.
The body of a writer from the festival is discovered at the bottom of a cliff, and the prime suspect is the guest of honour, the esteemed painter Duncan Stovall. With her background in the Met police, Jodie has got solving cases down to a fine art and she knows things are rarely as they seem.
Can she find the killer before the village faces another brush with death?
The second book in the Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker cosy mystery series. Can be read as a standalone. A humorous cosy mystery with a British female sleuth in a small village. Includes one of Jodie’s Tried and Tested Recipes! Written in British English. Mild profanity and peril.
I recently reviewed the first of this series and, as I said then, I do have a soft spot for a cozy crime.
‘A Brush with Death’ picks up fully where the opening installment left off. Having left the Met, Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker is still down in Cornwall and trouble is never far away.
Leitch is a charming observer of small town mores, in fact the opening line: “Whatever you do, don’t call it a fete,” is the sort of thing which people who have lived in small villages where appearances matter, will certainly recognize.
As Parker goes about trying to find out who has bumped off the guest of honour at the definitely NOT a fete, Leitch reintroduces us to the light hearted ways of her catering detective, this time in a narrative sprinkled with even more pop culture references spanning the decades (“Terminator… Abigail’s Party”)
In lockdown, many people appear to have returned to Agatha Christie or the cozy crime genre to take advantage of escapism in its purest form. Leitch is becoming one of the best at taking the minutiae of village life so beloved of the Golden Age legends and putting a humerous modern spin on it.
Purchase Links
http://mybook.to/murderonthemenureveal
Purchase Links
UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brush-Death-Nosey-Parker-Mystery-ebook/dp/B08CTX44K5
US – https://www.amazon.com/Brush-Death-Nosey-Parker-Mystery-ebook/dp/B08CTX44K5
Author Bio – Fiona Leitch is a writer with a chequered past. She’s written for football and motoring magazines, DJ’ed at illegal raves and is a stalwart of the low budget TV commercial, even appearing as the Australasian face of a cleaning product called ‘Sod Off’. Her debut novel ‘Dead in Venice’ was published by Audible in 2018 as one of their Crime Grant finalists. After living in London, Hastings and Cornwall she’s finally settled in sunny New Zealand, where she enjoys scaring her cats by trying out dialogue on them. She spends her days dreaming of retiring to a crumbling Venetian palazzo, walking on the windswept beaches of West Auckland, and writing funny, flawed but awesome female characters.
Social Media Links –
https://www.facebook.com/fiona.leitch.1/
PAJ Newman 
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