The Murderous Affair at Stone Manor: A Completely Gripping Cozy Murder Mystery

By Laura Stewart

Amelia Adams’s life is going nowhere. But when she inherits a Scottish mansion, she becomes the star of her own whodunit in this charming debut mystery.

Mystery fiction fanatic Amelia Adams is stunned when she inherits a dilapidated mansion, complete with secret passages, hidden compartments and its very own legend.

Helped by her brother, her best friend, and a documentary maker—who is determined to turn Amelia’s new life into a hit TV show—Amelia throws herself into renovating the house and unravelling old secrets.

When an unknown saboteur starts ruining her plans, Amelia doesn’t know who to trust. Everyone around her is acting strangely and soon Amelia finds herself in the center of her very own murder mystery . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504071949

Laura Stewart

Laura Stewart is the author of The Murderous Affair at Stone Manor, which was shortlisted for the Richard and Judy writing competition.

Book preview

1

Amelia Adams stopped telling people she worked for an advertising agency about a week after starting at Morrison, Gray and Compton. The words ‘advertising agency’ conjured up visions of power meetings and takeaway coffees littering her desk as she worked into the early hours of the morning on a multi-million-pound project: a far cry from her actual job. Arriving at her desk half an hour late courtesy of some thoughtlessly wet leaves on the railway line, her coat dripping with rain and her feet squelching in her Jimmy Choo rip-offs which pinched just a little too much to be comfortable (they’d never stretched with her feet as the shop assistant assured her they would), Amelia was met by a pile of mail on her desk resembling the leaning tower of Pisa. Amelia moved the date stamp on to Monday 2nd October and picked the first letter off the top.

To anyone visiting, the high-tech offices of Morrison, Gray and Compton looked impressive. The steel- and chrome-edged design matched the chiselled jaws and sharp tailoring of the Young Upwardly Mobile Advertising Executives, the smell of their raw ambition masked by the weekly delivery of lilies artfully arranged in the half-dozen vases dotted around the reception area. Amelia had been working there for almost a year; she’d arrived as a temp and after six weeks, when she hadn’t complained about the mind-numbing tedium of the job, they’d bought out her contract.

She now despised the smell of lilies.

Heaping an extra spoonful of coffee into her mug, the one the previous incumbent had left in the top drawer with the ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps’ gag emblazoned around the rim, Amelia reminded herself she was lucky she had a job at all. With depressing headlines of soaring unemployment figures, she knew a crap job was better than no job just as the damp shoebox of a flat she lived in was better than an actual damp box to sleep in. She needed to be grateful for what she had, and Amelia had a little something over and above her secretary’s salary to encourage her to turn up to work each morning.

It was the oldest cliché in the book – a boss and his secretary. She didn’t mind so much if others in the company knew – it might mean she would stop getting the worst jobs handed down to her, but for Jonathan it was different. As head of finance, he had to remain above office gossip and speculation. It didn’t seem to bother him that the rest of the typing pool had bets on him shagging Melissa from the director’s suite, but evidently a lowly receptionist like Amelia was beneath him.

Quite literally, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Five months previously, when they’d had their first, furtive snog in the stationery cupboard, Amelia didn’t mind their relationship starting off slowly. And she had to admit, the sneaking about added a certain frisson to their relationship. It also meant she’d stayed far longer in the job than she’d intended. She didn’t like the job but she did like Jonathan – how could she not? He had romantic-hero good looks. He was tall and whip-slim with a shock of blond hair, dimpled chin, long blond eyelashes framing beautiful blue eyes and he had a knack of smiling and looking like a naughty schoolboy which resulted in her forgiving him anything. But although at first she had welcomed a slow start, as the months rolled on nothing changed in their relationship. Amelia had tried pushing for them to be seen as an item and that was when Jonathan dropped the bombshell that he’d never be open about their relationship while they worked in the same office.

And in the present work climate, finding another job wasn’t that easy, even a badly paid job where the office manager treated you like their personal slave.

Amelia’s stomach gave a growl of hunger and she rummaged about her bag for breakfast. Unable to locate even a fun-size Mars bar, she did, however, find the latest Denholm Armitage crime thriller she’d bought yesterday, nestled in the folds of her oversized tote. Her fingers danced over the embossed gold writing before she surreptitiously opened the cover, already desperate for lunchtime, when she could immerse herself in a world of murder and intrigue – even if only for forty-five minutes.

She’d just skim-read the opening paragraph, describing a mutilated body washing up on a beach, when an all too real shadow of doom loomed over her desk. Doom, smelling of Youth Dew – an irony obviously lost on Doreen, head administrator, pushing sixty-four and as dehydrated as a Cup a Soup.

‘I take it you’ll be making up the half hour at the end of the day?’

‘Of course,’ Amelia said, dropping her bag and deftly kicking it under her desk to hide the book.

Slightly deflated at no argument or offered excuses, Doreen heaved up her right bosom with her forearm. ‘Mr Harris wants to see you,’ she said frostily. She looked her up and down in distaste. ‘You might want to do something with your hair first.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he won’t mind me being a little… moist,’ Amelia said saucily, smoothing down her hair. Cut into a gamine style which accentuated her petite heart-shaped face, it was the colour of rich chocolate ganache, which brought out the warm hazel tones of her eyes. What could be an unforgiving haircut on some worked for Amelia as it juxtaposed with her curves, which were pure femininity.

With a disgruntled huff Doreen led the way past the other Stepford secretaries to Jonathan’s office, rapped on the door with great efficiency and opened it wide.

‘Amelia to see you.’

‘Thank you, Doreen. Please make sure we’re not disturbed.’ Jonathan smiled at the older woman as he smoothed down his tie.

‘Of course,’ she simpered and Amelia could have sworn Doreen dropped a curtsey as she backed through the door.

Jumping up from his swivel chair, Jonathan twisted the venetian blinds shut and flipped the lock on the door before pulling Amelia towards him, dropping butterfly kisses along her collarbone.

‘God, the weekend always seems intolerably long, I can’t wait for tonight,’ he groaned into her neck as he pulled her towards him and she was engulfed in the familiar scents of toothpaste, hair product and his expensive aftershave.

‘Well, you’re the one with the hectic extended family of cousins, nieces and nephews you have to visit,’ she said, studiously keeping her voice light. From the outset he’d been the one who’d come up with the rule that they didn’t see each other over the weekend; that was his family time.

She very gently pushed his head away from her neck. Delicious as the kisses were, she really needed to get back to her desk otherwise she’d have to work through lunchtime to get through the pile of mail. ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ she purred, clasping her hands behind her back and swinging her body side to side, playfully.

‘I always want to see you. Every last inch of you. Naked…’

‘Jonathan!’ She laughed in mock outrage.

‘I want you to take some things down for me,’ he whispered as he fiddled with her belt.

‘I forgot my dictation pad.’ Amelia laughed, her stomach contracting with lust as he kissed her neck.

‘That wasn’t what I had in mind,’ he murmured as his hands inched up her pencil skirt, stroking the inside of her thigh. He stopped abruptly. ‘You never wear stockings anymore,’ he said petulantly.

Amelia didn’t like to tell him she couldn’t afford to keep buying a new pair each day; if only he didn’t always want to rip them off with his teeth.

‘Let’s have a quickie, I’ve not got a meeting for another half hour,’ he coaxed, pulling her over to his large mahogany desk.

‘Who said romance was dead!’ Amelia said, evading his embrace. She didn’t want to act like a killjoy but having sex on his desk didn’t hold as much allure since the time she caught her left buttock in the metal jaws of a lever arch file.

‘We’ll be quiet,’ he said, widening his puppy-dog eyes and hooking his finger inside the waistband of her skirt, pulling her towards him again.

‘You’re too much of a screamer.’ She laughed, batting him off.

‘Only cause you drive me wild,’ he growled into her neck.

She wriggled away from him, playfully slapping his hands away. ‘What I really want to do is have you tell me the itinerary of our holiday.’ She’d been counting down the days to their weekend in Sweden since Jonathan had first surprised her with the suggestion a month before.

But her excitement evaporated as he tensed up and drew away from her.

‘Ahh. Well. There’s a bit of a problem with that,’ he said.

She watched him walk around his desk and sit back down in his chair.

‘What kind of problem?’ she asked, keeping her voice light as she smoothed down her skirt.

‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get the time off,’ he said, flicking through his signature book.

Eventually, after a couple of minutes when she hadn’t said anything, he looked up at her, fiddling with the knot of his tie.

She folded her arms over her chest, drawing herself up to her full height of five foot seven, five inches of which were scarlet patent leather stilettos. ‘It’s a weekend. From Friday night to Sunday morning, none of which coincides with office hours.’ She tried to keep her voice calm, but could feel her eyes start to smart from disappointment.

Jonathan began to click and unclick the top of his rollerball pen.

‘You were the one who bloody well suggested it in the first place!’

He winced as she swore. ‘Shhhh, someone will hear.’

Now he was concerned with keeping quiet!

‘Look, we’ll try and get away in a few weeks, maybe after Christmas,’ he tried to reason.

But Amelia was in no mood for being reasonable.

‘I wanted to go away this weekend,’ she said, not caring that she sounded like a toddler on the verge of a tantrum.

‘Oh, baby, we’ll get away soon. Let’s face it, it was only going to be to Stockholm, hardly the most exciting place in the world.’

Maybe not to Jonathan, but she’d been ridiculously excited to be in the country that had produced the crime writers Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson and couldn’t wait to wander the streets and look at the same sights the fictional characters Wallander and Lisbeth Salander had, before her. As the only thing Jonathan ever read was Men’s Health magazine, he just didn’t have a clue what it meant to her.

He flashed her his boyishly charming ‘forgive me’ smile, though for once it didn’t have the same effect on Amelia. He tried to cajole her into a better mood. ‘Come on, cheer up, I’ll take you out to dinner tonight.’

She bristled. ‘Where?’

‘There’s a charming little out-of-the-way Italian I’ve been…’

She zoned out, knowing the routine – they never went anywhere trendy or new or local in case someone from work saw them. For a man who took great risks in his professional life, he was a pipe-and-slippers guy when it came to relationships. His office bravura masked his lost and vulnerable side and she knew she shouldn’t be so angry with him, but she now wanted more from the relationship than secretive sex and dimly lit restaurants.

‘Why can’t we go to the new Argentinian place? Or even the Pizza Express on the main road.’

‘You know a lot of the girls go there after work…’ His phone buzzed and he pounced on it, obviously relieved at the interruption.

‘Doreen. Yes, she’s still here. One moment.’ He held out the phone to Amelia. ‘It’s for you, a lawyer?’ Amelia took the phone from Jonathan, knowing that Doreen would love to know why a lawyer was contacting her, no doubt jumping to lots of wrong, but juicy, conclusions she could spread around the typing pool.

Amelia continued to glare at Jonathan across the desk as she listened to the lawyer. A few seconds later she put down the receiver.

‘That was Dotty’s lawyer, everything’s been settled and I’ve just to go round there and sign a couple of documents.’

Jonathan nodded encouragingly, his relief at the subject change palpable. ‘Ah yes, your aunt. Your mother’s sister, wasn’t it?’

Amelia refrained from clobbering him over the head with his desktop stapler. She’d told him enough times about Dotty, but he never seemed to take any of it in.

‘No, she was my godmother. I used to call her Aunty Dot, but she wasn’t my real, flesh-and-blood aunt. She was an old friend of my mother’s, they met when she and Dad were posted to France. Dotty had a house there and was their neighbour. Dotty was godmother to my brother Toby and I, then became our guardian and looked after us when Mum and Dad died,’ she said, prompting Jonathan to remember, but he just nodded blankly at Amelia. It was difficult for Amelia to put into words just what Dotty meant as she’d been so much more than a godmother to Amelia and Toby.

Her own parents had died when Amelia was very young but apart from eavesdropping on hushed conversations behind closed doors and being passed around a selection of relatives she and her younger brother had never met before, Amelia hadn’t really been touched by her parents’ death. Being packed off to boarding school from an early age with another load of ex-pat offspring, Amelia had only very hazy memories of them and until Dorothea Campbell-Delaney stepped in to take charge, she and Toby never had any secure base to call home.

She and her brother continued to board at school and Dotty wasn’t really meant to do anything other than be there if there was an emergency, but she’d looked after them, picking them up every Friday so they could stay with her each weekend in her crazily chaotic Chelsea flat. It was Dotty who’d started Amelia’s passion for mystery and crime novels after giving her a Poirot book and soon Amelia had become charmed with the little Belgian detective as well as the genre. Dotty didn’t have any family, just a couple of distant second cousins she never really talked about. She was an eccentric and Amelia loved her for it.

Her death came as a horrendous blow.

Amelia knew full well she wasn’t some daft teenager anymore but suddenly, six months ago, she had waved goodbye to her previous carefree life where the worst thing to happen to her was getting dumped by a boyfriend or snapping a heel on a night out. At the age of twenty-six Amelia had to turn into a grown-up who’d had their world shattered.

With Toby off travelling, Amelia had been all on her own. There was no one else to discuss funeral arrangements with or how to word an obituary for the paper. No one else was able to collect Dotty’s belongings from the hospital. Amelia had wept as she’d crammed all her godmother’s beautiful clothes and jewellery into an oversized Boots carrier bag and dragged it on the underground. She’d sat hugging the bag so tightly the plastic made her lap and torso damp with perspiration but she’d been terrified someone would try and snatch it from her and get away with the emerald-and-gold bracelet she’d stashed in the toe of Dotty’s taupe court shoe. Or that someone would guess the furry sleeve poking out the top of the bag wasn’t fake but actually real sable and spray-paint it, and her, in disgust. The hospital had tried telling Dotty not to keep anything of value with her but her godmother was adamant she let her standards slip for no one; not for the NHS and especially not the Grim Reaper. And when Dotty was adamant, no one dared stand in her way. Even at the end, with her body shrunken and skin hanging loosely on her frame, Dorothea Campbell-Delaney was an imperious force of nature, one that no staff nurse, senior surgeon or even minister for health dared cross.

Amelia was the executor of the will and also, rather surprisingly, a benefactor along with her brother. The Chelsea house and French holiday home were to be given, along with some of the money, to the distant members of her family, and the lawyer had confided in her that a huge chunk would be swallowed up by death duties. Amelia had nearly fainted when the lawyer told her she’d inherited a house in a village called Glencarlach, in the Scottish Highlands. Amelia had never even heard of the place. She knew Dotty was born in Scotland and her family hailed from there but since Amelia had known her, Dotty had always lived in Chelsea and she’d had no trace of a Scottish accent. Over the years, Dotty had spent occasional long weekends in Scotland, visiting an old friend, she’d said. But she never hinted that she had a house there. Even stranger, Dotty had made specific arrangements so that the house couldn’t be sold on. She’d even put it in Amelia’s name over a decade before so it wouldn’t be liable for inheritance tax. Amelia had never even seen a photograph of the house and was deeply intrigued to see what it was like. In her mind’s eye it was a lovely little whitewashed stone cottage with a real fire and low-beamed ceilings with walls a foot thick, a haven where she could seek solace from London life.

In fact, it would be perfect as a getaway for her and Jonathan.

‘You know I’m inheriting the house in Scotland, why don’t we go there for a weekend, in two weeks’ time?’

Jonathan gave a small laugh. ‘Can you really see us schlepping around a but and ben in the middle of nowhere? Darling, please don’t get your hopes up, it’ll probably be nothing more than an outhouse where livestock have taken up residence for the past twenty years. It’s not even as if you can sell the ruddy place.’

The vision of her lovely little cottage started to crumble away from her. Jonathan dealt with facts and figures and practicalities, he didn’t do romantic notions or whimsy. He liked functional hotels with power showers and room service and there was just no way he would ever find any sort of charm in a slightly dilapidated house in a windswept glen.

‘D’you mind if I take an early lunch so I can go sign the papers?’

‘Of course not! Why don’t you leave now? I’ll smooth it over with Doreen.’

Guilt made Jonathan very magnanimous.

‘Oh, and one thing,’ he called after her as she was leaving, ‘would you also be an angel and pick up my suit from the dry cleaners?’

2

Steering clear of the railway station and the potential hazards of wet foliage, Amelia caught the bus to the lawyer’s offices. Standing at the bus stop huddled under her umbrella, which was little use against the lashing rain, her mobile beeped at her. A text message from Jonathan. With a soaring heart, hoping he’d changed his mind about their weekend away, she opened the text, but he was merely confirming he’d booked dinner for eight o’clock and would be round at hers at seven. With a bottle of champagne.

Amelia seethed. The only bubbles she appreciated were the ones that came courtesy of a Radox bottle in a hot bath. She’d lost count of the times she’d told Jonathan she didn’t like champagne; it gave her terrible heartburn. She scrabbled about her bag for her notepad. First page was her ‘Top Priority To-Do List’, over the page was her ‘Secondary Important To-Do List’ and under that she wrote ‘buy indigestion tablets’ before dropping the pad back in her bag.

The dry cleaners was on the way and she hopped off the bus to collect Jonathan’s suit. It was the one he’d worn on their last date and she checked to make sure the shirt, tie and suit were free of the garlic oil he’d managed to splatter all over himself in his haste to hide under the table, thinking he’d seen someone from human resources. Paying with her own money, she bundled the suit over her arm and headed to see her lawyer.

Her lawyer’s office was a musty time-warped relic where all modern technology was eschewed for old-fashioned pen and paper. A relic himself, James Armstrong was a gentleman who stood when a woman entered a room. He’d been readying himself for retirement by cutting down on all his cases since his firm had merged with a massive corporate behemoth and he’d vowed to leave the moment a computer or printer was foisted upon him. Judging by the state of his room, Amelia noted he’d still managed to avoid anything that needed electricity to function.

After the usual offer of tea (always loose and served in bone china cups and saucers, with two rich tea biscuits on the side) and small talk of how awful the weather was, the older gentleman ducked down behind his desk to rummage through pillars of files. Amelia had just exhausted all her anecdotes about heavy rain when he held up some papers in triumph.

She duly signed at the bit he’d marked and then he handed her another bulky envelope.

‘Here is the property information along with the keys.’

She sat holding it for a moment, her stomach flip-flopping with a mixture or nerves and excitement. This house was a part of Dotty she’d never known. It was wonderful but it also made her incredibly sad realising she wouldn’t be able to talk to her about it. They’d talked about everything together, evenings spent in Dotty’s flat, sitting either side of the fire in the high-backed overstuffed armchairs, nursing a single malt and discussing everything from politics to the latest storyline on Emmerdale. Even months after Dotty’s death, whenever anything important or funny or noteworthy happened in her life, Amelia automatically went to the phone to call her godmother, only for reality to kick in like a blow to her stomach.

‘Do you not want to take a look?’ Mr Armstrong asked gently, interrupting her thoughts.

Amelia brushed her hand over the envelope, feeling the hard bumps of the keys.

‘I… um, I don’t know if I do,’ she said, realising she probably sounded ridiculous, as most people would be eagerly ripping open the envelope. ‘I’ve thought about this a lot and I think I’d quite like to just, well, to turn up and see the property in person for the first time. I never think photographs and room plans show the real character of the place.’

He gave her a bemused smile but nodded. ‘I can write the address on the outside of the envelope if you’d prefer. You can use one of those sat nags to find it.’

‘Please, that would be very kind of you. And it’s sat nav, short for navigator.’

‘Well, they sound like nags to me.’ He gave her an imperceptible wink as he copied out the address in neat copperplate.

But just because she wanted a surprise didn’t mean she wasn’t curious.

‘One thing, if you don’t mind telling me. I’ve had this glorious vision of the little cottage having a real fire, one I can cosy down in front of during cold wintry nights. Do you know if there’s a real fire?’

He smiled, giving a little chuckle as he passed her back the envelope. ‘If it’s a real fire you’re after, you won’t be disappointed. Now,’ he said, more seriously, ‘have you had any word from your brother?’

‘No, I’ve emailed him again, but I have no idea where he is or what he’s doing.’ As far as Amelia knew, her infuriatingly free-spirited brother had fallen off the face of the earth!

It had taken her so long to compose that first email, the one to let him know about Dotty’s passing. She remembered how the cursor on her computer had seemed to flash impatiently at her as she’d stared at the blank screen, unable to find the words. She’d started it so many times only to immediately delete what she’d typed. ‘Dear Toby’ had looked so formal and wrong as she’d never addressed Toby as ‘dear’ and probably never would, but the normal names she usually greeted him with were wholly inappropriate for the sort of news she had to impart.

She’d looked at the blank bright white screen so long she was worried she’d develop snow-blindness, before eventually plumping for ‘Dotty died. Come home,’ then adding, ‘please.’

Amelia knew an email was a horrible way to break the news but he’d left her no choice as she had no telephone number for him and it was blatantly obvious he’d forgotten hers.

Toby would no doubt think it hilarious that she’d spent sleepless nights worrying about him, but the last novel she’d read had a character who’d gone travelling only to be kidnapped by an underground espionage unit, tortured and brainwashed before being turned into an assassin. Since then, Amelia had visions of Toby wandering unsuspecting into a bar, being chatted up by a Russian agent who, unbeknownst to him, would slip Rohypnol into his drink and then bundle him into the back of a transit heading for a top-secret Siberian training ground. Always so trusting and quick to make friends, it was just the perilous situation he’d be likely to get caught up in. She’d emailed him a personal safety checklist to follow not long after he’d gone but, of course, she’d never heard from him to know if he’d received it. For all she knew he could already have a new name, fake passport and be trying to infiltrate the Oval Office at that very moment.

She’d feared the worst since he’d announced he was off to ‘find himself’ a few months earlier. Amelia had no idea how bumming around Thailand could help him decide what he wanted to do with his life, but he heartily believed foreign travel held the key to unlocking his inner happiness. In Amelia’s opinion a kick up the backside, a copy of the recruitment pages and a highlighter pen would have served him better but she’d long ago learnt to leave well alone when it came to meddling in her younger sibling’s life.

He’d sent her another postcard dated a month ago, from Vietnam. He didn’t mention Dotty so Amelia guessed he’d not logged on to his email account. If he knew he had a pot of money and a couple of vintage cars waiting for him, Amelia was certain he’d cut short his travels and come home.

‘One other thing,’ Mr Armstrong said as Amelia got up to leave. ‘There’s a chap Dorothea told me about, a Mr Jack Temple. It seems she employed him as a sort of handyman. He’d been staying at the property in Glencarlach and she wanted him kept on until the end of the period of employment he’d been contracted for.’

‘Oh!’ Amelia hadn’t factored in a handyman in her ‘cosying up to the fire’ daydream. ‘What is he doing?’

‘General maintenance, I believe. I don’t have specifics.’

‘How long will he be there?’

‘He’s due to finish up at the end of January. His remuneration had been settled before her death so there’s nothing you need to concern yourself with. Mr Temple spent time with Dorothea at her Chelsea property, maybe you met him?’

‘No.’ Amelia was surprised. She’d visited Dotty every week, and towards the end when the chemotherapy had been stopped, it was every day until she went into hospital. She’d never met anyone else and her godmother had never mentioned anyone. ‘Will there be room for us both to stay there as I’d hoped to go up soon to visit?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ the lawyer dismissed airily, ‘he’s not actually living there, he’s staying on the land, but in an outbuilding.’

Amelia’s heart sank slightly at this news. Maybe Jonathan was right, maybe the property was in such a state of disrepair the handyman didn’t even want to live there.

‘He does have access to your property though. And remember, Dorothea set aside money specifically for any repairs to the building. Just let me know what you need, when. There’s plenty to cover any eventuality.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I took the liberty of raising a small cheque for you, to get you started when you go up there, in case you need any furnishings or supplies. Or even just to get transport there in the first place.’ He handed her a separate envelope.

‘Thank you. And thank you for all your help with everything.’ Amelia could feel a lump in her throat as she shook hands with the older man.

‘My dear, it’s been a pleasure.’ He grasped her hand warmly in his. ‘I knew Dorothea for many years and it was a privilege. She thought so highly of you, considered you and your brother as the family she never had.’

Amelia smiled and hurried away in case she started to cry again.

‘And try not to worry about that brother of yours,’ James Armstrong called out. ‘Dorothea told me she was sure he’d come good in the end.’

With a parting wave and eyes swimming with unshed tears, Amelia made her way back down to the entrance and it was just as she got to the main doors and saw the rain bouncing off the pavement she realised she’d left her umbrella in the lawyer’s offices. She ran back to the elevator and jumped in just as the doors closed. She cast a glance at the only other passenger, a man who’d hurried past her in the foyer. He was leaning against the back wall, huddled inside a big black duffle coat and was scratching the rough stubble on his chin, which she could just make out beneath the heavy hood he’d pulled down low over his face, almost completely covering longish lank, blond hair.

And then she couldn’t see anything at all; the lift suddenly stopped and they were plummeted into darkness.

3

Amelia stayed silent as her fellow prisoner issued a tirade of expletives aimed, she hoped, at the lift and not her.

There was a sound of boot against lift door and Amelia sucked in her breath, not relishing the prospect of being confined to a four-by-four space with a violent lunatic.

‘Don’t do this to me!’

The cut-glass accent took her by surprise, but she supposed posh folk could be crazy too.

‘Did you happen to see a service phone anywhere?’

As he could only be talking to her, Amelia swallowed. ‘No, but there might be an alarm somewhere on the panel.’

She heard him feel his way along the wall.

‘Christ! I really don’t need this,’ he muttered.

‘Are

Reviews for The Murderous Affair at Stone Manor

[Cindy Myers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the characters in this book. It had a good story that kept me interested. I was wondering how towards the end everything would be solved in such a short amount of time but it all tied together well. No one was actually murdered within the book timeline though so the title is interesting.