The First Edition - An English Village Cosy With A Ghostly Twist: A Bloomsbury Bookshop Mystery Novella (Prequel to Murder at Marchmont & Bell)
About this ebook
Cleo Marchmont travelled to her great-aunt’s Sussex cottage for a funeral.
She did not expect the cat.
She did not expect the ghost.
She really did not expect the dead woman at the bottom of the garden steps.
When Cleo arrives in Firlestone for a quiet week of cottage-clearing, she gets an opinionated tabby called Boswell who is choosing her against her better judgement, and a Great-Aunt Vivienne who has been waiting eighteen months for someone to talk to.
Then the village’s most disliked resident is found dead at the foot of her own garden steps.
The constable is content to call it a tragic fall.
Vivienne, with one raised eyebrow, is not.
A scone still warm on the counter. A kettle on a low heat. A bone-coloured hairpin in the gravel.
Cleo has four days to catch a killer, pack the cottage, and post the keys back to the solicitor. Someone in this village has already noticed she is asking too many questions.
And in her bag are the keys to a struggling Bloomsbury bookshop she has not yet seen.
The First Edition is the standalone prequel novella to The Bloomsbury Bookshop Mysteries. For readers of Lucy Connelly, Verity Bright, and Jackie Baldwin.
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About the author
Imogen Penrose grew up in libraries and ended up in Bloomsbury, which is a perfectly natural progression. She writes The Bloomsbury Bookshop Mysteries, a cozy series set in central London and following Cleo Marchmont, an amateur sleuth who inherits her great-aunt's struggling bookshop and discovers it comes with three complications: a tabby cat with opinions, the ghost of her great-aunt who refuses to leave the premises, and a body in the Russian literature section.
She trusts her readers to keep up, prefers specific details to ornate ones, and is fond of small London neighbourhoods that feel like villages. She lives in a flat with a view of a Bloomsbury garden square and a tabby cat called Boswell, who is named for Samuel Johnson's biographer and who appears in her newsletter rather more often than is strictly necessary.
She is at her happiest in second-hand bookshops, at her most reliable on her morning walk through Bedford Square, and at her least useful before the second cup of tea.
