Retired librarian and bookshop owner May Morrigan lives in the affluent village of Blackheath with Fletcher, her best friend since they met decades ago, and May’s two dogs. What could be more normal? But May is not your average little old lady . . .

After an unpleasant church volunteer and an annoying local butcher meet their untimely ends, Fletcher and May team up to do some sleuthing. Soon, the elderly pair start working with a young journalist to investigate the case of a missing girl and its possible link to previous unsolved crimes. May finds this new project quite intriguing. She’s never met a murderer before—and now she just may get the chance, if they play their cards right…

IN A NUTSHELL
That was so much fun. Original, well-written and over-the-top in the best possible way. 

This isn’t the cozy mystery about old people playing amateur sleuth that it appears to be, partly because the old people aren’t who they appear to be and partly because it’s written in a way that uses all the cozy tropes but then smiles and says, “You do know the world is never that nice, don’t you. So you know we’re going to have to…” 

I had two questions when I finished the book: Why isn’t there already a TV series of this? Why does the cover make this unique, sharp-edged little gem look so generic? It’s as misleading as serving whiskey from a teapot.

I’ve had ‘A Most Unusual Demise’ on my shelves for over a year. I finally pulled it to the top of my TBR after I set aside my first pick for the COZY MYSTERY Halloween Bingo square, ‘Murder Most Bookish’, at 25%, and I needed a replacement. This was the best replacement I could have hoped for.

I was hooked from the first chapter. It was beautifully written, flowing as smoothly as a perfectly executed long single-take dolly shot, tracking May Morrigan’s progress through Blackheath, effortlessly establishing her character and her status in the community while sharing some of her backstory. It was engaging and even ended with a smile. I knew I’d struck gold.

May Morrigan and I are from the same generation (she was sixty-nine when this book was published – the same age I am now), so we share a lot cultural reference points, includng the pop son titles that start evey chapter, Unlike me, May was a middle class wild child, at least until years of effort by her ex-husband shoehorned her into a surface level of respectablity. 

The plot is punctuated with murders and the concern for missing girls who may have been abducted and murdered. These aren’t soft-focus murders and abductions, but they’re not exploitative either. Yet this isn’t a book about solving murders so much as a book about understanding why the murders happened and who the murderers are. The murder mysteries are primarily a device for getting to May and her best friend, Fletcher, and to watch May start to regain some of the freedom she took for granted before her marriage. 

I loved that while May and Fletcher are sometimes charming and sometimes acerbic, they are neither harmless nor blameless. This is unusual in a cozy mystery. I found it refreshing. The nice people in the story, the ones motivated simply by the desire to find the missing girl and bring the killer to justice, are the young people. I enjoyed how May made them seem as innocent and hopeful as puppies but was still willing to enlist their help, while Fletcher saw them as an invaluable source of modern slang.

May and Fletcher are wonderful creations who I want to learn more about. I loved the humour and the grit of the story. It was original, surprising and engaging. I’ve already bought the next two books in the series: ‘A Most Malicious Messenger’ (2024) and ‘A Most Curious Christmas’ (2025)

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