Hardback: "I won't care if I never see another red rose," Simmy muttered to herself, while carefully arranging a bouquet comprising ten of the things. It was her eleventh Valentine's tribute of the day, and the sense of being swamped was becoming unbearable. "And still another day and a half to go," she sighed.
Valentine's Day is fast approaching and Persimmon 'Simmy' Brown's flower shop near Lake Windermere is doing good business. But when Simmy receives a string of anonymous delivery orders, each one causing their recipient great distress, she begins to suspect that the messages they contain mask a sinister intent. When one of the recipients disappears, it would seem that her worst fears have been confirmed.
As if that is not enough, Simmy's friend Kathy turns up, on the trail of her wayward daughter Joanna, who she fears has grown unhealthily close to one of her university tutors. When Kathy attempts to reason with her daughter, she finds that Joanna's older lover may be even more menacing than she had imagined.
With both Kathy and Joanna in peril, Simmy and her friends find themselves caught up in a web of deception, blackmail and murder. It seems that Simmy Brown faces her most puzzling, and perhaps her most dangerous, case yet.
The Coniston Case (2014) is the third book in the page-turning and well-paced Lake District Mystery series.
About the author: Rebecca Tope, a British crime novelist and journalist, lives on a smallholding in Herefordshire, where she plants trees and watches wild birds, but manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time as well. Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later. In 1992, she founded Praxis books, a small British press.
She is the author of three murder mystery series, featuring the fictional characters of Den Cooper, a Devon police detective, Drew Slocombe, a former nurse, now an undertaker, Thea Osborne, a house sitter in the Cotswolds, and Persimmon Brown, a florist in the Lake District. Her books are set in real English villages. She uses a kind of "anti research", avoiding discussion with any of the villagers, but does walk along the footpaths and visits most of the village pubs.
She is currently working on a biography of Sabine Baring-Gould. Tope is also ghost writer of the novels based on the ITV series Rosemary and Thyme.
Rating: 5/5
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