Murder Served Cold by Paula Williams

Val Penny ♦ December 28, 2018 ♦ 2 Comments

I chose Murder Served Cold when I was brousing Amazon because I just loved the title! This is the debut cosy crime novel written by Paula Williams and published by Crooked Cat Books. The story is set in the little village of Much Winchmoor.

Kat Latcham returns home after a disasterous love affair goes wrong.
She hopes something exciting will happen to lessen the boredom of living with her parents and working in her mother’s hairdressers and the local pub. 

Something certainly does happen. She and her childhood friend, Will Manning, discover a corpse in one of the freezers of Will’s farm shop. Then, Will’s father, John, is arrested for the murder. The village of Much Winchmoor is such a hotbed of gossip, that everyone is convinced John Manning is guilty, except for Kat and Will, who believe he’s innocent.

Then there is a second murder and Kat is sure she knows the identity of the murderer so she sets out to prove it, with terrifying consequences.

Murder Served Cold is a great page turning murder mystery, laced with humour, romance. I very much enjoyed the book and look forward to further novels by Paula Williams.

The Author

Paula Williams has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil but she’s been making up stories since she was old enough to speak, although her early attempts were more of the “It wasn’t me, Mum, honest. It was him” genre.

Her first ‘serious’ effort was a pageant she wrote at the age of nine to celebrate St George’s Day. Not only was she the writer, but producer, set designer and casting director, which was how she came to have the title role. She also bullied and blackmailed her three younger brothers into taking the supporting roles, something they still claim to be traumatised by.

Many years later, this pageant became the inspiration for her first publishable short story, Angels on Oil Drums, which she sold to the UK magazine Woman’s Weekly. Since then she’s had over four hundred short stories and serials published in the UK and overseas. She also has a number of novels in large print which are available in libraries.

With the changing face of the magazine market, Paula now focuses her attention on her first love, crime fiction and is busy planning and writing a whole series of Much Winchmoor mysteries. She is a proud member of both the Crime Writers’ Association and the Romantic Novelists’ Association. She also writes a monthly column, Ideas Store, for the UK writers’ magazine, Writers’ Forum and for the last five years has written the pantomime for her local village Theatre Group. She still hasn’t run out of things to write about and is waiting for someone to invent the thirty hour day.

She has two grown up sons, two beautiful daughters-in-law and three gorgeous grandchildren. She lives in Somerset with her husband and a handsome rescue Dalmatian called Duke who is completely bonkers and appears frequently on her blog. (The dog, not the husband!)

Val Penny