Murder Actually

Romance novelist Elspeth Gray hates mysteries. Not just real-life ones, but the kind with smoking guns, chalk outlines, and Prof Plum in the library with the lead pipe. Luckily, her picture perfect New England home town of All Hallows doesn't seem the most likely place to find many of those, so Elspeth should be able to get on with her latest novel without anyone finding out that the 'Queen of Dessert Romances' is in frequent danger of burning her own kitchen down.

Until, that is, a dead body turns up at her book signing, carefully arranged to give an observant detective plenty of not-so-subtle clues. And then a couple more follow, until All Hallows begins to look like the set of an Agatha Christie dramatisation.

Persuaded and bullied by her clue- and sleuth-mad best friend Julia (who bases her crime-solving techniques on detectives who are (a) fictional, and (b) cats), can Elspeth find the murderer, fend off the unwelcome attentions of her ex-husband and persuade her agent that she is not the stuff of which mystery novelists are made?