A Peach Season Murder: Havens Valley Mysteries, #1

By Lilian Watts

It's the height of a scorching Australian summer, the peaches are hanging heavy on the trees and the tiny town of Havens Valley is bustling with the harvest.

Trish Winters runs the small general store in the middle of town and prides herself on knowing every single resident of the valley.

But murder comes to even the most beautiful places in the world, and Havens Valley is no exception. When her friend is found dead in the post office, Trish has a number of mysteries on her hands: which of her friends and neighbours is a killer? is that gorgeous police sergeant actually chatting her up? does happiness come from all around or deep inside? and will the murderer strike again?

A Peach Season Murder is a SHORT READ of 13,000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Green Earth Books
• Release date: Oct 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393670117

Book preview

Chapter One

C ould you get the door for me please, Mrs Winter, I think I’ve got too many—Oops!

I looked up as Milly managed to drop all four of the parcels she was carrying over to the post office. She gave me a grin and bent to pick them up again, then giggled as she realised her hands were full once more and she still couldn’t open the door.

I tried not to roll my eyes. Milly was a dear, but sometimes I just couldn’t see what my son saw in her. Unless, of course, it was just this. Silly-billy Milly. Cute, funny, loyal, caring and, bless her, original blonde.

I pulled open the door for her and kissed her on the cheek as she went past. Trish, I told her. How many more times am I going to have to say it, Mills? Now you’re done at high school, I’m Trish, not Mrs Winter. You’re making me feel old.

I stepped out of the shop with her and watched her cross the road to the post office.

You’re not old, Mrs—um, Trish, she called over her shoulder. I could tell from her tone she’d said that because she knew she had to. I smiled to myself. Was I that naive when I was eighteen? I didn’t think so, but that was thirty years ago now. More years than I wanted to think about. Kids these days, hey? What were we going to do with them?

It was a quiet morning. Hot and humid already and it wasn’t yet nine. An Australian summer. Milly dodged the puddles on the road from yesterday afternoon’s thunderstorm. They were steaming in the morning sunshine, the world washed clean, the dust and the heat laid down for just a few hours until the pitiless sun cooked us up again. I drew back into the shade of the verandah and peered up into the heartless blue sky above the mountains that rimmed the valley. It was going to be a stinker.

Havens Valley, population 463, that number swelled by the arrival of Lucy and Ben Wong’s twins four months ago, was a quiet town, even in the middle of summer – our busiest season. We were the peach growing capital of the country – a perfect microclimate beneath the heat of the plains, sheltered by the ragged mountains, cooled by afternoon breezes from the sea. In winter we got just enough frost to sweeten the sap in the trees, in summer, just enough heat to make the peaches drip with the taste of sunshine.

Right now, our village was full of peach growers anxious about the harvest, visiting pickers itchy with peach fuzz, the locals like me and Maureen over the road in the post office who supported them, and our restless bunch of teenagers at home on school holidays. What with the urgency of getting the peaches off the trees and away to market before a really severe storm shot them through with hail, and the kids nervously waiting for university entrance results, it was a tense time in the valley. Well, as tense as things got around here anyway.

I drew in a deep breath of sweet, peach flavoured air and went back inside the shop. It was dark and cool inside – no air con on yet. Maybe later in the day, though we were expecting another storm in the early afternoon. The shop was the Havens Valley General Store – an old stone building with deep wide verandahs that had tended to the needs of the valley’s inhabitants since the town’s glory days back in the 1860s. Gold fever days.

Back then the town had been home to six thousand miners and their families, Scottish and Irish mostly. They had called the town Comnock and, I liked to