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And Then There Was The One: A Novel (Atria Books) - Softcover

Waters, Martha

 
9781668069578: And Then There Was The One: A Novel (Atria Books)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668069571 ISBN 13: 9781668069578
Verlag: Atria Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From Martha Waters, the author of the “enchanting” (Entertainment Weekly) Regency Vows series, a new historical romance set in 1930s England with a murder mystery twist.

In a quaint village in the Cotswolds, Georgiana Radcliffe has accidentally become an amateur detective after helping solve four murders in a single year. When the chairman of the village council turns up dead, everyone agrees with the official ruling of a heart attack, but Georgie can’t help but suspect that the council chairman is a fifth victim. Now, murder tourists are flocking from around the country, in hopes of becoming sleuths themselves.

Along with her reporter friend, she reaches out to a famous London detective for assistance in ascertaining why they have become a magnet for murder. But the fancy detective is simply too busy—or can’t be bothered—to help, and instead dispatches his secretary, Sebastian Fletcher-Ford—a posh womanizer who, truthfully, is just trying to get out of his hair, much to practical, no-nonsense Georgie’s dismay. But as they investigate in the charming Buncombe-upon-Woolly—with plentiful scones, sheep on the village green, and murder tourists at every turn—Georgie finds that her previous assessment of Sebastian may have been wrong, and rather than solving a murder, she may be solving for love instead.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martha Waters is the author of And Then There Was the One, Christmas Is All Around, and the Regency Vows series, which includes To Have and to Hoax, To Love and to Loathe, To Marry and to Meddle, To Swoon and to Spar, and To Woo and to Wed. Originally from South Florida, she is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently lives in London.

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From the author of the Regency Vows series, a new historical romance set in 1930s England with a murder mystery twist.

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Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
Georgie wasn’t hysterical by nature, but four seemed like an awful lot of homicides.

“Don’t you think it’s becoming rather odd?” she asked Arthur as they stood amidst a small cluster of villagers outside Mr. Marble’s shop, watching as Constable Lexington led Mrs. Marble away. It was a sunny morning in May, the air mild and a bit damp from last night’s rain. The storefront bearing a hand-painted wooden sign reading the Marbled Cheese and a display of several wheels of Double Gloucester did not appear the likely location of a murder. There was a fair amount of shocked murmuring among the crowd, combined with the occasional dark mutter about always having suspected something was odd about Mr. Marble’s wife.

Arthur, who was watching the proceedings while jotting down notes on the pad he’d fished out of the pocket of his trousers, glanced over at her with a frown. “What is?”

“Four murders in a year!” Georgie said in an undertone, but further discussion of this oddity was forestalled by Arthur choosing that precise moment to weave his way through the crowd, soliciting interviews; one person, a very pretty woman about Georgie’s age with brown hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose, looked exceptionally eager to speak to him. Georgie was fairly sure the woman was a Murder Tourist—she thought she recognized her from a previous visit to the village that winter—and wondered whether it was her ghoulish interest in violent crimes in quaint settings or Arthur’s own particular charms that made her quite so happy to speak to a member of the press. Arthur was a reporter for The Woolly Register, and Georgie supposed he did have a professional obligation to report on the resolution of a murder investigation, so she waited patiently for him to finish his work.

At last, Arthur pocketed his notepad and returned to her side. “What were you saying?”

“Ten minutes ago,” Georgie said acerbically, but then relented. “Buncombe-upon-Woolly is small. Even a single murder should be the event of the year—of the decade!”

“And it was,” Arthur reminded her as they turned away from the Marbled Cheese to continue their progress down the high street, nodding to everyone but avoiding being trapped in conversation. (This was always a hazard in a village the size of Buncombe-upon-Woolly, especially when one was a Radcliffe of Radcliffe Hall. And Georgie, for better or worse, could lay claim to that surname.) “I thought the entire village would collectively perish from excitement when the vicar was poisoned—do you know we sold more papers that week than we did in the entire previous month?”

Georgie personally thought Arthur might try a bit harder to sound less gleeful about murder-induced profits, but the recent crime spree in Buncombe-upon-Woolly had undoubtedly proved to be a promising development for his career.

“But then Mr. and Mrs. Fieldstone were poisoned only a couple of months later!” Georgie pointed out. “And then there was the Christmas murder at Radcliffe Hall—”

“The readers loved that one,” Arthur said fondly. “I thought the ‘Murder Under the Mistletoe’ headline was one of my best.”

Georgie cut him a scathing look. “It was at my house.”

“I know,” Arthur agreed with a solemn shake of his head. “Which is unfortunate in terms of Christmas memories, I expect, but it was dashed convenient for me, in terms of access to the crime scene. The Deathly Dispatch only wishes they’d had their reporter on the ground for that one!”

Georgie rolled her eyes; The Deathly Dispatch was an anonymously published broadsheet that had begun circulating solely in response to Buncombe-upon-Woolly’s crime spree, and it was more or less the bane of Arthur’s existence, obsessed as he was with getting scoops before its unnamed reporter, who went by the nom de plume Agent Arsenic.

“But this one makes four,” Georgie said, refusing to allow herself to be drawn into yet another discussion of small-town newspaper rivalries. She cast a glance over her shoulder at the Marbled Cheese crowd, where Mr. Vincent—the owner and editor in chief of The Woolly Register, and therefore Arthur’s employer and, given the size of the village, his only coworker—was still busy taking photographs of the exterior of the Marbles’ shop. “I wouldn’t have thought Mrs. Marble capable of murder. She’s always been very kind.”

“You’re just annoyed you weren’t the one to catch her,” Arthur said slyly, nodding at Mrs. Penbaker, the wife of the village council chairman, in passing. Her husband, Mr. Penbaker, had been blustering in his usual fashion outside the Marbles’ shop, loudly proclaiming to all assembled that the streets of Buncombe-upon-Woolly were safe once more now that the murderous cheesemonger was soon to be behind bars. Arthur had got a lengthy quote from him on the dangers of bitter wives with easy access to arsenic, and Georgie, who had only listened to approximately a third of his speech before beginning to mentally catalogue the plants in the greenhouse at Radcliffe Hall, had been hard-pressed not to roll her eyes.

Georgie huffed out an irritated breath as they came to a stop before the library, which was an almost offensively charming building of honey-colored stone with ivy creeping up its walls in the very heart of the village. “I didn’t ask to help solve those murders, you know,” she said as Arthur stepped forward to open the door for her. “It’s not my fault that no one else in this village seems capable of identifying common poisons.”

“Some of us, George, have better things to do than spend our days studying every weed we spot growing along the riverbanks,” Arthur said, and Georgie had to exercise great restraint to stop herself from elbowing him in the stomach. She was twenty-five now, and while that had not been an uncommon habit when she and Arthur were younger, she thought vaguely that she should perhaps attempt to be a bit more dignified in her advanced age.

“Being able to identify a bouquet of lily of the valley in a woman’s kitchen, when the vicar’s symptoms perfectly matched those associated with that particular poison, is just common sense,” Georgie said in an annoyed whisper. “And yet the police were too stupid to manage even that basic level of investigation.”

“See? You’re irritated that they didn’t consult you.” Arthur sounded smug, as he so often did lately, pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up on his nose; his articles for the Register had garnered regional interest, and a few had even been picked up by some of the London papers. She could tell he was daydreaming about the glamorous life he would lead in London once he managed to secure a reporting job there instead; he was already dressing the part, she thought, casting a thoughtful glance at the herringbone trousers and carefully pressed shirt he was wearing. He made her feel rather dowdy by comparison, in her serviceable brown dress and woolly cardigan—but, she thought philosophically, she’d spent her entire life not caring much about how she looked, so there was no reason to start now, just because Arthur was looking a bit… well, dashing. (At least, she noted with satisfaction, his curly dark hair was as unruly as ever.) No doubt he intended to abandon Buncombe-upon-Woolly for a...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668069571
ISBN 13 
9781668069578
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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