Murder on Midsummer Hill

A Mothwick Garden Club Mystery

In the picture-perfect village of Mothwick, flowers are never just flowers.

Each summer, the Midsummer Flower Fair transforms the rolling slopes of Midsummer Hill into a riot of colour, competition, and carefully concealed grudges. When a respected botanist and long-standing garden club elder is found dead among the prize delphiniums, the village’s polite routines begin to fray.

Cora Bellamy, a professional botanist who once fled Mothwick and its suffocating floral politics, has returned only for the fair. But grief, suspicion, and unfinished loyalties draw her into the quiet aftermath of the death. Rather than chasing clues in the usual sense, Cora encounters Mothwick through its people: committee rooms and tea tents, allotments and village halls, kitchens and footpaths at midnight.

Each encounter reveals a different fracture beneath the village’s cultivated surface—rivalries disguised as tradition, power hidden behind procedure, and the ways obsession can curdle into something dangerous. As truths surface not through confession but through consequence, Cora must decide what role she will play: observer, participant, or something in between.

Murder on Midsummer Hill is a gently witty, atmospheric cosy mystery about gardens, gossip, and the lethal potential of small communities determined to keep up appearances.

©2025 Amelia Maplewood (P)2026 Amelia Maplewood