Deadly Nightshade

Book 1

When a celebrated food critic drops dead at a village fête, botanist Hazel Morgan finds herself investigating a murder that strikes dangerously close to home.

After six years away, Hazel has reluctantly returned to Thornworthy to help her grandmother Maggie run the family’s traditional herb shop. But her homecoming takes a sinister turn when Italian celebrity chef Paolo Vincenti dies during the village fête, poisoned minutes after judging a herbal tea competition.

With her grandmother as the prime suspect and a methodical detective inspector closing in, Hazel is drawn into the investigation, and must use her botanical expertise to uncover the truth.

From the gossip-filled tea rooms to Thornworthy Hall’s aristocratic gardens, everyone seems to have something to hide. Between threatening phone calls, break-ins, and cryptic warnings from unlikely allies, Hazel must untangle a web of greed and old grudges before the killer strikes again.

A Death Amongst the Daffodils

Book 2

April in Thornworthy means one thing: the National Garden Scheme tour, and the village in full bloom. Instead, the village wakes to find its most difficult resident dead among her daffodils, and the lanes locked in by Dartmoor fog.

Nobody is leaving. Which means the killer is still here.

Dr Hazel Morgan came back to Devon to help run a herb shop, not to pick apart the lives of her neighbours. But Myrtle Trevithick kept a notebook, and someone is very keen to ensure it stays unread. As the investigation tightens around a small circle of suspects: a grieving volunteer, a vindictive neighbour, a council official with interests to protect, Hazel must navigate the gap between what the village is willing to say and what Myrtle’s garden has already told her.

Working alongside DI Noah Farrell is becoming a more complicated proposition than it was six months ago. Hazel is good at reading evidence. She is less certain what to do with what she is reading in him.

Before she can work that out, the case takes a turn she wasn’t prepared for, and the truth, when it comes, is harder than she expected.