Midsummer Murder

About Midsummer Murder

A country house hotel under renovation. A midsummer bonfire. Fourteen guests who all know each other.

And the woman Sheila has been working for — sitting three doors down the hall. Sheila Cooper's sixth assignment is unlike anything before it. Ashgrove Park is not a private home — it's a hotel, stripped to its bones by renovation, with scaffolding on the south wing and the original structure visible beneath the plaster.

She's been hired to manage security while the owner hosts a long-standing midsummer gathering: fourteen guests, one bonfire on the longest night, and a tradition that runs deeper than anyone at the front desk needs to know. Then Sheila finds Fiona Ramsay's name on the guest list. The woman who arranged every one of Sheila's sittings.

The voice on the phone across five investigations. The person who has been Sheila's mentor, her sounding board, and — she is beginning to realize — someone carrying a version of the truth with a hole in it she didn't know was there. When a guest is found dead at the lake after the bonfire, the investigation forces Sheila to work a case in which the person she trusts most is in the building, adjacent to the evidence, and not entirely honest about why she's there.

DI Friel asks the right questions. Max alerts at the stable block path. The scaffolding gives Sheila a vantage she's never had before — on the property, and on the relationship that has defined this series from the beginning.

Some houses show you what they're made of when the walls come down. So do some people.