About this book
On Bonfire Night, while the whole village watched the guy burn, someone let themselves into the post office.
Little Fennington, November 1952. Next morning is pension day, and Peggy Ashdown unlocks her counter to find her landlord dead in the back room, struck down with a weight from her own parcel scales.
The police have a tidy answer. He had served Peggy notice to quit, Peggy had a key, and the weapon was hers.
But Peggy has run this post office for fourteen years, and she notices things a detective from Cheltenham never would: a kettle somebody used in the night, a brass weight turned the wrong way in its tray, a letter in the post box whose flap isn't quite as it should be.
Her landlord had a key of his own, a nose for other people's business and enemies all round the Green: the hard-up Major, the vicar's wife with her mysterious envelopes to London, the new schoolmistress who is hiding something, and his own nephew, who seems to know more about his uncle's will than he should.
Peggy never gives away what passes over her counter. To clear her name and keep her post office, she will have to find out who in Little Fennington has been keeping secrets of their own.
Murder at the Village Post Office is the first full-length Little Fennington Mystery: a fair-play whodunit set in a Cotswold village the year before the Coronation, with a black cat called Penny Black, gentle humour, real history, and no gore or bad language. For readers who enjoy Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and James Runcie's Grantchester mysteries.
Peggy's first case is the prequel novella Murder by Telegram. Her story continues in Murder at the Christmas Sorting Office.
Book details
- Author
- Clara Bramley
- Formats
- Kindle eBook · out 4 November 2026
- Series
- The Little Fennington Mysteries, book 1
- Publisher
- Sunday Afternoon Press