Welcome To Your Friendly Bookshelf

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bookouture
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 29, 2026
Format:   Paperback  and ebook
Print length ‏ : ‎294 pages
Genre:  Cozy Mystery Fiction

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF “Murder at the Cornish Book Club” by Fliss Chester

I got this book as an ARC in NetGalley. I am not a person who looks for cozy mystery books, but I have found out that if I feel like going into a reading slump, this genre usually helps me out of it and refocuses my reading goals. This book was released at the end of June, so it was a perfect fit.

I think the book was good. It was fun, entertaining, with murder and mystery guiding the way. I did not read Book#1; however, except for a few moments in which solving a previous murder was brought up, I felt that it was not necessary for me to read the first book to follow the second one.

Maddie was smart, funny, a bit shy (maybe a bit too much?), Nor or Grand (the grandma) was hilarious and by far one of my favorite characters. We also had the entire book club, the victims, and, of course, the handsome detective trying to solve the murder. All happening in the beautiful Cornish bayside town.

PREMISE OF THE BOOK AS FOUND IN AMAZON / GOODREADS:

Maddie Penrose is settling into Cornish life with her fun and feisty grandmother, Nor. She throws herself into getting to know the locals, helping out at the village book club and enjoying the occasional G&T in the pub with handsome police officer DI Tom Trevelyan. But one sunny morning, her newfound peace is shattered when she spots Quentin, a member of the book club… dead, with a knife in his back.

To Maddie’s surprise, it transpires that almost all the other members of the book club have a motive to murder Quentin. Quentin’s own wife, a fellow reader, seems to be hiding something. The local romance author isn’t all sweetness and light, and another writer is keeping secrets. But is one of the book lovers in the sleepy seaside village really responsible for Quentin’s untimely death?

No sooner has the ink dried on the page of the first killing, another takes place – and the second victim is also a member of the book club! As Maddie frantically scrambles to get her clues down in black and white, she unearths a discovery connected to Nor. Is her gran the next victim on the list?

MY RATING: 4.0

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fliss Chester lives in a little village in West Sussex, and writes witty, fast-paced cozy crime. When she is not killing people off in her 1920s and 1940s whodunnits, she helps her husband, who is a wine merchant, run their family business. This means she’s never far from a decent glass of something, which makes her very happy indeed.

Before writing her two cozy crime series, she wrote fun and flirty romances – the sort of thing that might make your mother blush. Not hers though, as it was her mother who always encouraged her to be ‘anything you want, darling, as long as it’s not dull’. Hopefully readers will attest to the fact that whether it’s death by cyanide or a smooch in a hot tub, there’s nothing dull about Fliss’s books.

The current series that Fliss is working on is the Hon Cressida Fawcett Mysteries Series. Our heroine, Cressida, is a fun-loving heiress in 1920s England – though when she’s not propping up the cocktail bar at The Savoy, she’s helping people with their interior decorating projects. Through her love of decorating, and the fact she keeps tripping over dead bodies, she realises that her eye for design means she has an eye for a crime too. Why not pick up the series with the first book, Death Among the Diamonds, and join Cressida for a martini and a murder!

• Murder in a Cornish Teashop
• Death by a Cornish Cove
• Death Among the Diamonds
• The Moonlit Murders
• Death in the Mayfair Hotel
• Death in an English Village