Last Remedy

This year it ends with one.It is late summer in the Yorkshire Dales, and Brackenbeck is ready for its biggest day: prize tups, Victoria sponges, a beer tent, a tug-of-war, and old Dr Hartley, ninety years old and the dale's doctor for forty-three of them, presenting the cup as the Show's President.Bea Calvert has a stall, a share offer and five weeks for the village to buy the Old Dispensary before the only chemist for fifteen miles is sold. She does not have time for another mystery. But when Dr Hartley stops at her table and says the marquee has gone a funny shade of blue, and collapses not twenty minutes later in the very tent where it all began, she knows the dale is about to say "e;his heart"e; again. And she knows it is wrong.The answer lies in the snow winter twenty-six years ago, in a page cut from her mentor's daybook, and in a roofless ruin on the fell road where Edmund Sowerby once left a parcel that nobody was ever to know about. To find out who killed the old doctor, Bea must find out who Edmund really was, and decide what a chemist should do with the truth when it finally comes back down the dale.The Last Remedy is the fifth and final Brackenbeck Mystery: a warm, wry, fairly clued summer whodunnit set in a Yorkshire Dales village, with a pharmacist sleuth, a disapproving old terrier, a slow-burn romance and absolutely no gore. It brings the series to a close and is best read after the other four.