Gilt Before Christmas
An English Village Mystery – A Cotswolds Bookshop Cozy

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Advent has come to Little Fernsbury. Frost on the honey-coloured stone, holly on the church door, a Christmas tree on the Green and a pub that smells of mulled wine from three in the afternoon. Everyone in this Cotswolds village is busy with the Christmas Fair, and nobody more than Tamsin, who has a clipboard and no mercy.

Clementine Ashby, known to all as Clem, runs the secondhand and antiquarian bookshop on Church Street, where a large grey cat sits in the window beside a stuffed scarecrow in a red scarf. This December she has a second job: cataloguing the two thousand books of Marlcombe Court, the old manor house beyond the park, before its contents go under the auctioneer's hammer on the fifteenth. The old lady who owned it died in September. Her library is a bookseller's dream.

Then the heir arrives from London. He means to sell the house, send the housekeeper packing and cancel the village's Christmas tree. Within days he is dead, and the police in Cheltenham have already decided who is to blame. Detective Sergeant Jonah Okafor, polite, thorough and still allergic to Bartleby, is less sure. Clem is certain of only one thing: somebody is still searching Marlcombe for whatever the old lady left behind.

With the Christmas Fair only days away, Clem must read gold leaf, paper and ink before the hammer falls. Gilt Before Christmas is the second book in The Little Fernsbury Bookshop Mysteries, a cosy crime series with an amateur sleuth, a country house and an English village mystery to solve. A Christmas cozy mystery for long, dark evenings, with a bookshop, a cat and a fire in the grate.