MILLION-copy selling author Fiona Walker, who grew up in Hamstead Marshall, has turned to a life of crime.
After penning 22 romping romcoms that saw her dubbed ‘The New Jilly Cooper’, Fiona’s debut murder mystery series The Village Detectives, is set somewhere that might seem familiar…
Thirty years ago this July, Fiona addressed an audience in Newbury’s Arts Workshop about her debut romcom novel French Relations. She then went on to write many more and even had a fictional column in the Newbury Weekly News for a few years.
Now she’s turned to a life of (cosy) crime set in a fictional village based on Kintbury.
“West Berkshire was my go-to murder destination from the moment I hit upon the idea – beautiful, commutable, diverse and historic, and somewhere stitched into my heart,” she tells N2.
Welcome to the beautiful English village of Inkbury. It’s best known for having a picturesque riverside that appeared in a Richard Curtis movie. That is, until the murder…
When former stand-up comic Juno Mulligan moves to Inkbury from the States, it’s mostly to watch out for her elderly mother, whose three-times-a-widower new boyfriend looks dangerously like he might be a murderer.
She hopes that her friend, disgraced-journalist-turned-novelist Phoebe Fredericks can help her crack the case. But before they have a chance, a local art dealer washes up dead, on the village’s famous riverbank.
His lover’s in the frame, but Juno and Phoebe suspect there’s a deeper secret…
Will the unofficial Village Detective Agency solve the mystery before the killer strikes again? In sleepy Inkbury, as they soon discover, living one’s best midlife can be murder.
Inkbury is based on Kintbury, a stone’s throw from the cottage where Fiona spent her childhood, and often later returned to write.
Now based in in Warwickshire with her partner and two daughters, Fiona says: ‘I love the magical area where West Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire meet. It was the landscape in which I set a series of books I wrote about three-day-eventers, and it reappears in The Village Detectives as the fictional county of Wexshire.’
The setting is not the only thing Fiona’s bringing back. “My detectives are two of my favourite heroines from previous novels; Phoebe from Kiss Chase, and Juno from Snap Happy, who find themselves living in the same village in midlife, with a whole new perspective on love, death and sleuthing.”
The Art of Murder is published by Boldwood Books in eBook, hardback, paperback and audiobook: https://mybook.to/ TheArtofMurdersocial.
Book 2 in the series, The Poison Pen Letter, follows in November, with more in 2025.
Website: www.fionawalker.com
·Facebook, Twitter and Instagram: @fionawalkeruk
Fiona’s new publisher, Boldwood, is a digital-first innovator whose books sell in their multi-millions but are rarely found in shops.
