Gretchen is an assistant at The Great Beyond funeral home in the village of Hatterton Crow, and she is not having a good day. Her father is having one of his "prescient turns" again, her mother is planning a trip to Spain with her informal ladies' society, and to cap it all, the village baker, Ben Tonkins, has died, which means that Gretchen will be bereft of her favorite dense, jammy sponge cakes. And there is something entirely fishy about Ben's death that sits ill with the intrepid mortician.

And what's worse is that Gretchen's solemn and sensible boss, the honey-voiced Carmel, seems to have come down with a case of the crazies, botching the embalming process on Ben, and getting wildly smashed on vodka before bashing both Gretchen and another villager, Rosie Tawber, with a cricket bat.

But Gretchen knows Carmel, and she knows that cricket was never her game, so she sets out with the help and hindrance of the villagers to discover who, exactly, is the murderer in their midst ii and what could be their motive in this sleepy corner of England.

About Ormolu Mockingbird:

Ormolu Mockingbird writes the "Hatterton Crow" cosy mystery novels set in a fictitious and peculiar English country village. She lives in an old, crumbling and possibly haunted house near Liverpool, England. Half-wild cats live in the tall grasses of her overgrown garden, and crows have nested noisily in the chimneys of the house. She is a graduate of Liverpool University, where she spent her student days obsessively reading the canonical authors of British and Twentieth-Century Irish literature.

To date, she has released two novels: Murder in Hatterton Crow and Murder is Sweet in Hatterton Crow. Further works in the series are planned for release during 2014.