Jodie ‘Nosey ’Parker is back!
When a body turned up at her last catering gig it certainly put people off the hor d’oeuvres. So with a reputation to salvage, Jodie’s determined that her next job for the village’s festival will go without a hitch.
But when chaos breaks out, Jodie Parker somehow always finds herself in the picture. The body of a writer from the festival is discovered at the bottom of a cliff, and the prime suspect is
the guest of honour, the esteemed painter Duncan Stovall. With her background in the Met police, Jodie has got solving cases down to a fine art and she knows things are rarely as they seem.
Can she find the killer before the village faces another brush with death?
The second book in the Jodie ‘Nosey ’Parker cosy mystery series. Can be read as a standalone. A humorous cosy mystery with a British female sleuth in a small village. Includes one of Jodie’s Tried
and Tested Recipes! Written in British English. Mild profanity and peril.
Purchase Links
UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brush-Death-Nosey-Parker-Mystery-ebook/dp/B08CTX44K5
US – https://www.amazon.com/Brush-Death-Nosey-Parker-Mystery-ebook/dp/B08CTX44K5
Goodreads’ Rating: ☀️☀️☀️☀️
A Brush with Death is the fun next installment in the Nosey Parker series. This time around, Jodie (aka Nosey) helps DCI Nathan Withers discover who murdered a speaker at the village Art Festival, and the results are full of thrills, spills, and a love diamond that will blow your mind.
Jodie “Nosey” Parker always finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation, and the men in her life seem to become suspects. As an ex-cop, Jodie is in her comfort zone, asking the hard questions and unearthing clues that will lead to the bad guy’s arrest. She is fun, incorrigible, stubborn, and has a whole lot of sass, just the kind of main character I adore. I missed her daughter, Daisy, her mother, Shirley, and her friend Debbie, in this story, as they only appear briefly, but it enabled Jodie to shine as the main character. With these characters being sidelined, a lot of the humor found in the first book, unfortunately, is sidelined with them, though I still found myself chuckling here and there.
What I’m calling a love diamond (or square, though diamond seemed more apropos) is between Jodie, Tony (the best friend who appears to want more than friendship), Nathan (the uptight DCI who flirts with her), and the new guy in the village who is only there for the Art Festival, Duncan Stovall -the guest of honor. The rivalry between the men dominated the first half of the book, which provided some fun and lightness but took away from the murder mystery. I would have liked to see more of the murder investigation during the first half interspersed more liberally with the romance. It still is an intriguing development in the story, and I will be curious to see how it continues to play out.
I enjoyed the inclusion of the intricacies of the art world in the story. The artworld is just ripe for corruption, which may lead to murder in the right situation. It adds a wealth and beauty component to the story that seems unapproachable and brings it down to a more human level. The mystery has plenty of red herrings and misdirects for the puzzle lover. I was on the right train of thought but guessed the wrong murderer.
If you are looking for a fun, more contemporary version of a British cozy, look no further than the Nosey Parker series.
Fiona Leitch is a writer with a chequered past. She’s written for football and motoring magazines, DJ’ed at illegal raves and is a stalwart of the low budget TV commercial, even appearing as the Australasian face of a cleaning product called ‘Sod Off’. Her debut novel ‘Dead in Venice’ was published by Audible in 2018 as one of their Crime Grant finalists. After living in London, Hastings and Cornwall she’s finally settled in sunny New Zealand, where she enjoys scaring her cats by trying out dialogue on them. She spends her days dreaming of retiring to a crumbling Venetian palazzo, walking on the windswept beaches of West Auckland, and writing funny, flawed but awesome female characters.
Social Media Links –
https://www.facebook.com/fiona.leitch.1/
https://www.instagram.com/leitchfiona/
Tessa Talks Books 
I think I’ll read this book. It’s time for Cosy Mysteries now. Dark, rainy, grey, Winter, pandemic days.
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They definitely will combat the dreariness ❤️
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