Measure of Malice

The man she dreaded has come up the dale. And someone at the Christmas lock-in poured him a measure he was never meant to wake from.Bea Calvert has kept the Old Dispensary open through a summer poisoning, an autumn of wrong prescriptions and an inspection that nearly shut her down. All she wants from December is a quiet Christmas, a working boiler and to get through the Harkerdale Christmas Dinner and Dance without meeting the one guest on the seating plan she has spent six years trying to forget.Howard Keeling signed the letter that followed her out of a Leeds hospital. Now he is lodging at The Fleece, he has something he wants to tell her, and he will not say what until the morning.By the morning he is dead.The snow has shut the Narrows. Nobody could have come up the dale, and nobody can leave it. There were eleven people at Brenda Sykes's lock-in, one pan of her famous warm damson gin and ten pewter measures, and a sealed envelope on the dead man's desk with Bea's name on it.The detective inspector on the far side of the drifts has a very simple theory, and it has Bea at the centre. To prove him wrong she will have to read a village Christmas the way she reads a prescription: by what goes in, what comes out, and what does not add up by a single tablespoon.A Measure of Malice is the third Brackenbeck Mystery: a warm, wry, fairly clued Christmas whodunnit set in a snowbound Yorkshire Dales village, with a pharmacist sleuth, a disapproving old terrier, a slow-burn romance and absolutely no gore. It can be read on its own, and it is best read by a fire.