A cracked inscription. A dead expert. A village that has protected the same secret since 1947. Archivist Delia Spencer has spent five months cataloguing the ancient bells of Wickenford, and she has never doubted the tower's proudest claim: a bell cast in 1712, the finest of its kind for fifty miles. Then a visiting bell historian looks at the crown and says the one sentence no one in the parish wants to hear - the inscription has been re-cut, and the fifth bell is not what everyone has always believed.
He promises to file his findings within the fortnight. He never gets the chance. The night before his report is due, he climbs alone into the ringing chamber to take one last measurement - and the bell he trusted brings itself down on top of him. The coroner calls it a tragic accident. Delia isn't convinced. A bell's stay is built to be the weakest part of the fittings, designed to break safely before real harm is done - but the broken timber she finds in the belfry is the wrong wood entirely, cut to the exact length and fitted by someone who knew precisely what they were doing.
Following a trail through parish account books, a diocesan faculty register, and a fifty-one-thousand-pound restoration grant, Delia uncovers a village bound together by one carefully guarded lie from the winter of 1947 - and one person, much closer to home, willing to kill to protect a very different secret. With a patient detective sergeant and a sharp-eyed bell historian each following the same cold trail, Delia must work out which of Wickenford's oldest friends is capable of murder, before the next bell tolls for her.
THE WINTER BELL is the second novel in the Wickenford Mysteries - a traditional English village mystery for readers who want a fair-play puzzle, a richly drawn cast of suspects, and a setting almost no one else has thought to explore: the hidden, exacting world of church bells and the people who keep them ringing.
A cracked inscription. A dead expert. A village that has protected the same secret since 1947. Archivist Delia Spencer has spent five months cataloguing the ancient bells of Wickenford, and she has never doubted the tower's proudest claim: a bell cast in 1712, the finest of its kind for fifty miles. Then a visiting bell historian looks at the crown and says the one sentence no one in the parish wants to hear - the inscription has been re-cut, and the fifth bell is not what everyone has always believed.
He promises to file his findings within the fortnight. He never gets the chance. The night before his report is due, he climbs alone into the ringing chamber to take one last measurement - and the bell he trusted brings itself down on top of him. The coroner calls it a tragic accident. Delia isn't convinced. A bell's stay is built to be the weakest part of the fittings, designed to break safely before real harm is done - but the broken timber she finds in the belfry is the wrong wood entirely, cut to the exact length and fitted by someone who knew precisely what they were doing.
Following a trail through parish account books, a diocesan faculty register, and a fifty-one-thousand-pound restoration grant, Delia uncovers a village bound together by one carefully guarded lie from the winter of 1947 - and one person, much closer to home, willing to kill to protect a very different secret. With a patient detective sergeant and a sharp-eyed bell historian each following the same cold trail, Delia must work out which of Wickenford's oldest friends is capable of murder, before the next bell tolls for her.
THE WINTER BELL is the second novel in the Wickenford Mysteries - a traditional English village mystery for readers who want a fair-play puzzle, a richly drawn cast of suspects, and a setting almost no one else has thought to explore: the hidden, exacting world of church bells and the people who keep them ringing.
