Burying Bad News by Paula Williams

Val Penny ♦ September 17, 2020 ♦ Leave a comment

I have enjoyed each of the novels by Paula Williams so, recently when I had a particularly stressful time to endure, I turned to one of my favourite authors for comfort. There’s nothing like murders in Much Winchmoor to cheer me up!

The Blurb

One severed head, two warring neighbours – and a cold-blooded killer stalks Much Winchmoor. There’s the murder made to look like a tragic accident, and a missing husband. Could he be victim number two?

The tiny Somerset village is fast gaining a reputation as the murder capital of the West Country, and once again, reporter/barmaid/dog walker Kat Latcham finds herself reluctantly dragged into the investigation.

Things are looking bad for Ed Fuller, the husband of one of Kat’s oldest friends. Kat’s convinced he’s innocent – but she’s been wrong before.

Has Kat come across her biggest challenge yet?

Fans of Janet Evanovich could well enjoy this “funky, modern day nosey detective” transported to the English countryside. The third Much Winchmoor mystery is, as always, spiked with humour and sprinkled with a touch of romance.

The review

This is the third in the Much Winchmoor series of murder mysteries and it was fun to meet up with some familiar characters and meet new ones. The author weaves her tale and leads the reader up blind alleys and through humorous encounters from the very beginning.

The red herrings, romance and murder combine effortlessly to make a fine novel. This is an exciting story, delicately told. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.

The author

Paula Williams is living her dream. She’s written all her life – her earliest efforts involved blackmailing her unfortunate younger brothers into appearing in her plays and pageants. But it’s only in recent years, when she turned her attention to writing short stories and serials for women’s magazines that she discovered, to her surprise, that people with better judgement than her brothers actually liked what she wrote and were prepared to pay her for it.
Now, she writes every day in a lovely, book-lined study in her home in Somerset, where she lives with her husband and a handsome but not always obedient rescue Dalmatian called Duke. She still writes for magazines but now also writes novels. A member of both the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Crime Writers’ Association, her novels often feature a murder or two, and are always sprinkled with humour and spiced with a touch of romance.
She writes a monthly column, Ideas Store, for the writers’ magazines, Writers’ Forum and has a blog at paulawilliamswriter.wordpress.com. Her facebook author page is http://www.facebook.com/paula.williams.author. And she tweets at @paulawilliams44.
Not only that, but when she’s not writing, she’s either tutoring, leading writing workshops or giving talks on writing at writing festivals and conferences and to organised groups. She’s appeared several times on local radio – in fact, she’ll talk about writing to anyone who’ll stand still long enough to listen.
But, as with the best of dreams, she worries that one day she’s going to wake up and find she still has to bully her brothers into reading ‘the play what she wrote’.

http://www.paulawilliamswriter.co.uk