The Snowdrop Mysteries

Fenella Conyers, a distant Raynham connection, unexpectedly appears at Beaumatin, the ancestral home of the Barons Raynham, with a request and a gift. After a life spent roaming the globe, she wants to settle down in the Cotswolds and asks if her noble cousin has an empty cottage where she could stay until she can find her own place. The gift is an extremely rare snowdrop—a yellow “spiky” that Fenella mysteriously acquired in her travels and which she has named Mystic Mayhem.

At the same time, the Church Ladies Guild is agog about a cult that has purchased a vacant Victorian vicarage. Called The Disciples of the Everlasting Bliss, the group’s charismatic leader Jophiel is rumoured to preside over orgies and other, much darker, rites.

It is the long summer vacation and Oxford professor Maggie Eliot—who is also Lady Raynham—finds her husband’s eccentric relation sympathetic and is concerned when Fenella disappears. Maggie begins to search for the woman but is hindered by the presence of her ambitious, social-climbing sister-in-law Cilla and the discovery of a body in the Beaumatin woods.

Mystic Mayhem is the twentieth book in the Snowdrop Mysteries series.