The seaside town of Whitby, overlooked by the ruisn of a famous medieval Abbey high on a cliff, is the setting for this new series featuring Liz, a widowed early retiree who moves to Whitby, buys the adjacent Kipper and Gull Cottages to live in and renovate. For company she rescues Nelson an English Bull terrier, and while walking one morning in the church graveyard near the ancient Abbey they find the dead body of the well-known Professor Crowby recently working on curating the Abbey museum collection.
When Liz hears the corpse had drowned, her curiosity gets the better of her and when she visits an antique dealer to get an appraisal on some old ginger beer bottles found during renovating and later hears that a valuable medieval girdle or belt worth 80,000 pounds has recently gone missing from the Abbey museum – that plus knowledge that the deceased Professor had been receiving regular payments from the same antique dealer – she returns to the shop with her pal Jilly and finds more than antiques, another corpse. This puts Liz and Jilly in an even worse position with the new caustic chief inspector. This makes Liz even more determined to discover how the two deaths might be connected but is at a loss and getting nowhere chasing suspicions and asking questions. The cottage renovation however is going well and between Mah Jong games, walks with Nelson and removing old carpet and laying new tile she’s pretty busy!
Continue reading “Death at the Abbey by Jan Durham – A Kipper Cottage Mystery”