A tranquil village. A poisoned cupcake. A murdered vicar.
A simple case – or it should be. But all clues point to the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute, and Detective Inspector Adams is about to discover there’s much more to the W.I. than just bake sales and jam-making.
Alice Martin knows the ladies of the W.I. are not guilty. But she has a bigger problem. Toot Hansell has a large and dragonish secret, and she needs to keep the police well away from it. Beaufort Scales, High Lord of the Cloverly dragons, knows even better than Alice that the modern dragon only survives as long as no one knows they exist….
This investigation is about to take on dragonish proportions.

Sometimes, my best reads turn out to be the books that I stumble across while looking for something else. I found ‘Baking Bad’ while trying to find a book I’d planned to listen to on a long drive north. I listened to the sample and knew that I had to try it.

It turned out to be a wonderful confection, perfect for lazy afternoons. Very English. Very cosy. Set is a small Yorkshire village, It has: a vicar murdered by a poisoned cupcake, the members of the village Women’s Institute, led by a retired RAF Wing Commander, as the most obvious suspects, a newly promoted DI, transferred in from London who is very much out of her element in rural Yorkeshire running her first murder investigation AND dragons (although it’s important the no one, especially the DI, finds out about the dragons).

I found the opening of the book a little slow, mostly because there were so many characters to introduce (and almost all the WI are Characters) and a murder to set up but I was carried forward by Patricia Gallimore’s excellent narration and by the acute observations and gentle humour.

 The pace picked up once DI Adams started to interview the WI members. Their interactions made me laugh. Some of the woman were a little cartoonish or perhaps more like people from an English SitCom but the humour worked and the mystery kept everything moving.

Then the dragons appeared (think large dogs rather than small dinosaurs) but they can only be seen by people who are willing to accept their existence. They can change their scales to camouflage themselves and they use magic that makes most people not want to focus on where the dragons are. The dragons were discovered by one very clear-eyed open-minded member of the WI and have built a relationship with the group which the WI keeps secret.

The mystery of the vicar’s murder isn’t particularly complex. It serves mainly to introduce DI Adams and the two key WI members and the two dragons who team up to interfere in her investigation.

I’d expected the dragons to be the main pull of the story. but while they were novel and intriguing, it was the dynamics between the women in the WI and between them and DI Adams that keep me turning the pages. The gentle humour was quietly amusing because, while the situation was bizarre, the people were instantly recognisable. I also loved that the women of the WI and the dragons understand that tea, cakes and scones are mainstays of civilisation.

I liked that neither the head of the WI not the DI were quite who I initially thought they were and that they reached an unexpected and deeply pragmatic accommodation with one another to get the case solved. I found that I wanted to know more about what the leader of the WI did when she was a Wing Commander and why she retired to such a small village and I wanted to know exactly what happened to DI Adams in London that made her leave the Met, move to Leeds and have a nose for things that other people refuse to see.

 I was surprised at how much fun ‘Baking Bad‘ was. It was a whimsical ‘Why not?’ pick that I didn’t expect much of. It turned out that the humour works for me and the people and the dragons were more complicated than I’d expected. I went to look at the other seven books in the series (which I’m sure i’ll read) and my eye was caught by the title of the first book of a more recent series, starting in 2023, which features DI Banks BEFORE she came to this little Yorkshire village. It was called ‘What Happened In London’. I really wanted to know the answer to that, so I made it my next read.

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“Hello lovely people!

I’m originally from New Zealand, and have lived and worked in various (usually warm) countries around Europe, the Pacific and the Caribbean. I’ve been writing since before I could do joined-up letters, and while I’d like to think my stories have improved, my handwriting may have actually deteriorated. So it’s a good thing no one publishes handwritten books anymore.

These days, I write books that are an escape hatch from the serious stuff in the world, full of fun, magical stories that leave you smiling. They’re about tea-drinking dragons solving mysteries in sleepy Yorkshire villages, and snarky feline PIs with scruffy human sidekicks.

There are ladies of a certain age being their wonderful, formidable selves, baking-obsessed reapers setting up baby ghoul petting cafes, and gender-nonconforming trolls redefining trollness for the modern age. 

They’re about friendship, and loyalty, and lifting each other up, and will let you step outside the world as we know it for a little. Most of all, they’ll remind you that life, and people (of all sorts of descriptions), can be very wonderful indeed.

But the cats really are terribly snarky, because that’s how cats are, and not even magical books can change that. But we love them anyway, right? Right…