I seem to have been busier than usual lately. I’m not sure if this is because I have been, or if it just seems that way. But anyhow, I haven’t quite got round to a proper marketing effort for Pippa Parker book 6, Past Tense, which launches next Tuesday, 30 June.
Past Tense was an interesting book to write. It’s the first Pippa book where I’ve dictated the first draft, but due to lockdown restrictions at the time, I ended up doing this while pacing up and down our small back garden and the side of the house. It’s also the first Pippa book to feature a cold case, since it involves the village’s literary figure, Victorian poet Clementina Stoate. I’ve written quite a few books set in Victorian times, but this is the first time I’ve mixed contemporary and Victorian.
I always knew, right from thinking about the first Pippa book, Murder at the Playgroup, that Clementina Stoate would turn up later in the series. After writing book 5, The QWERTY Murders, I fancied doing something a little different. I had read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, which features an extremely cold case, and I decided to reread AS Byatt’s Possession, in which two academics researching different Victorian poets make an important discovery. Past Tense isn’t like either book, but both gave me plenty of food for thought, and if you haven’t read them, I thoroughly recommend them.
As usual, Past Tense will be available in ebook and paperback and also via Kindle Unlimited, and you can preorder it now.
Here’s the blurb:
The coldest case you ever saw…
When Pippa Parker attends a meeting about Clementina Stoate, Victorian poet and former resident of Much Gadding, she has no idea what she’s getting into.
First a file of Clementina’s letters goes missing — and of course there are no copies. Who has taken the letters, and why?
Clementina’s descendant hires Pippa to track the letters down. But as she investigates their disappearance, Pippa discovers a bigger mystery. The only problem is that everyone involved is dead.
Can Pippa go back in time and solve a case which has puzzled Clementina’s readers for generations? Or is she risking her reputation for nothing?
Past Tense is the sixth book in the Pippa Parker cozy mystery series, set in and around the English village of Much Gadding.
Liz Hedgecock 