Murder in Bloom by Liz Fielding #Giveaways

 

 

 

 

MEET ABBY FINCH. SHE’S A BUSY MUM OF THREE, AN EXPERT GARDENER AND THE STAR OF YOUR NEW FAVOURITE COZY MURDER MYSTERY.

One part jealousy. Two parts rage. Somewhere in Abby’s sleepy little village, the perfect murder is brewing . . .

Abby enters the Maybridge Flower Show, never dreaming for one moment that she’ll win the gold. Or an invitation to appear on telly, alongside gardening legend Daisy Dashwood!

Some people say Daisy’s a tiresome diva. But starry-eyed Abby can’t wait for the cameras to start rolling. Until . . .

Daisy staggers out on stage. Only to collapse at Abby’s feet.

Her demise might seem like a tragic accident — resulting from a cocktail of booze and hay-fever medicine.

But Abby’s not so sure. She starts digging, to uncover shifty suspects at every turn. From snarky co-stars to a toy-boy lover, they all had reason to want Daisy dead and gone.

And that’s not the only puzzle playing on Abby’s mind . . .

In life, Daisy went nowhere without her trusty caddy of healing teas. Now it’s vanished.

What if someone’s been tampering with Daisy’s favourite cuppa?

Buy on:
Amazon Kindle            Amazon UK           Amazon Aust

1.    How did you pick the title for your books?

 Oh, well, now. I started with three titles for my conceived trilogy. A Rose for the Dead, Murder With Mistletoe and A Fatality of Foxgloves. My heroine is a garden designer and I was thinking along the lines of plant material. As you can see, I didn't keep any of them.

There appears to be a convention in publishing cozy crime that every title should start with the same word -- murder and death being the most popular. I now appear to have added prepositions - among, under, in... I have Murder at Lavender Lodge as my next working title. We will see. 

2. How did you choose the setting for your books?

Despite the fact that my publisher keeps promoting Maybridge as a sleepy little village, it's obvious to anyone who reads the books that it's a small, historic town. My first idea was to set it in a town like Bath. Big enough to be interesting, but closely packed and cupped in surrounding hills. In the end I moved the setting a little way further down into Somerset and the small, historic town of Bradford on Avon with its river, old wool mills, and pretty shopping area.

It is Tudor, but it's on the edge of the Cotswold and the buildings are stone. Sadly the cover designers took Tudor to mean the black and white cottages found in other parts of the country. Never mind.

3. How did you come up with the names for your characters?

I can't remember. I just play with names until they feel right and fit the age of the characters.

4.What makes your characters irresistible?

Kindness, mostly. Empathy. And let's face it, Jake is pretty sexy. :)

5. Share some random facts about yourself...

I was born about 25 miles from London in a pretty riverside town - one that has provided plenty of inspiration for locations in my books over the years. I left home and went to work in Zambia as a secretary when I was 20 where I met my husband - an engineer from Coventry - and lived in Botswana, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kenya before settling back in the UK with our two children. My son - a bit of an IT genius whose book, Advanced Penetration Testing: Hacking the World's Most Secure Networks is a university textbook - sadly died of a brain haemorrhage seven years ago, but my daughter and son-in-law live near me with their three children. Next year will be a significant birthday.

6. Your advice to new writers.

Stay off the internet and get the words down. This is heartfelt.

Tell us about your book..

Murder in Bloom, the third in the Maybridge Murder Mystery series, opens early in the morning on the first day of the Maybridge Show. My garden-designer heroine and sleuth, Abby Finch is being congratulated by locally-born celebrity gardener and national treasure, Daisy Dashwood, for her show garden. Daisy, who famously suffers from hay fever and a rumoured a drink problem is decidedly unsteady on her feet, is going to present her television show The Potting Shed from the main marquee and invites Abby to join her on stage.

She doesn't wait for an answer - who would say no? - but staggers on to waspishly criticise the next garden, designed by a Quentin Latimer-Blythe who is supposed to be her guest on the show, but with whom she has "history". Daisy, it would seem, isn't quite the "sweetheart" of her PR image. Later, with The Potting Shed show about to go live on air, Quentin has left in a huff and Daisy is missing. Abby is left to hold the fort until Daisy staggers onto the stage and collapses at her feet.

When there is no obvious cause of death, but any number of people with a motive to see Daisy dead, her friend, DI Iain Glover turns to Abby for help.

Liz Fielding met her husband when they were both working in Zambia and were keen members of the Lusaka Theatre Club. He was playing John de Stogumber in St Joan, and she was the pageboy to the Earl of Warwick. He swore it was the purple tights that got him.

 

Years spent in Africa and the Middle East provided the background to many of Liz's romances. Her first, An Image of You, was set in Kenya, in a place where they had spent many happy weekends on safari. It was plucked from the slush pile because the feisty feminist heroine made her editor laugh. Emotion touched with humour has been the hallmark of her work ever since.

 

After writing 70 books for Harlequin Mills and Boon, Liz has now turned to crime, signing with Joffe Books for three "Maybridge Mysteries", the first of which, Murder Among the Roses, is published on 18th April.

 

 

Liz Fielding on the web:

 

Website             Facebook           X.          Instagram           TikTok

 Multiple Giveaway Alert! 

Kindle copy of Murder Among the Roses 

Kindle copy of Murder Under the Mistletoe

Kindle copy of Murder in Bloom

Audio codes for Murder Among the Roses & Murder Under the Mistletoe

Let us know in the comments which giveaway would you like to go in for!