Arson & Old Lace

Chapter One

I pulled the car in close to the hedgerow and turned the key, and that amazing silence came down. It was the silence I had been wanting for more than a year, since my husband had left me, since I'd decided my only hope of peace lay in the ancient rhythms of an English village.

I used to wake in our apartment on West Eighty-third and listen for that silence through Manhattan's background hum. Keeping by long habit to my side of the bed, I would see behind closed eyelids the narrow country road and the old cottages with roses in bloom on their walls, as they had been when Quin and I had first come to Far Wychwood.

The village inn had been more affordable than an Oxford hotel when we'd come over to attend the wedding of our daughter, Emily, in Christ Church Cathedral, and we'd loved it so much, we had stayed there again when our grandson was born. The memory had become a refuge after Quin told me he'd fallen in love with another woman, and then through the hard labor of adjusting to life alone.

I closed my eyes and sank into the silence. When I opened them I saw my new home, standing where it had stood since the ... read full excerpt from Arson & Old Lace: A Far Wychwood Mystery ebook