Foraging for Murder

A food festival. A four-hundred-year grudge. And a butcher who won't be going home.

When Mortiforde hosts its annual food festival, Lord Mortiforde is hoping for artisan cheeses, local ales, and a peaceful weekend. Instead, one butcher has vanished, another has received a sinister threat, and the Vegetarian Society has been issued a very meaty ultimatum.

So when the Council's Chief Archivist disappears — along with the Food History Marquee's star attraction, a seventeenth-century recipe book — it becomes clear that someone is stirring up a grudge that's been simmering for over four hundred years.

Meanwhile, Lady Mortiforde is on a desperate quest for wild boar meat to save her savoury pie entry in the festival's Bake Off competition. And Lord Mortiforde can't help wondering why every butcher in the village takes their pet pig for a late-night walk in the woods…

Suddenly, ancient secrets, missing persons, and very suspicious pork products combine into a mystery that's been marinating far longer than anyone suspected.

He may be settling into the job — but Lord Mortiforde is about to discover that in the charming English town of Mortiforde, old recipes have a habit of calling for blood.

If you love British cozy mysteries packed with quirky characters, dry humour, and twisty plots, Foraging for Murder is your next obsession.

✔ A quintessential English village setting

✔ A deliciously twisty whodunit

✔ Eccentric suspects and sharp, dry humour

✔ A centuries-old mystery with modern consequences

✔ Book Two in the Marquess of Mortiforde series

Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, M.C. Beaton, and the village mysteries of Midsomer Murders.

Can Lord Mortiforde unravel a four-hundred-year-old conspiracy before the killer serves up another body? Pick up Foraging for Murder — the second Marquess of Mortiforde mystery — today.

"Agatha Raisin meets the Great British Bake Off in Foraging for Murder. Simon Whaley blends bucolic eccentricities, village gossip, food festivals and cold-blooded murder in his latest cosy mystery." - Bookish Jottings

"We are in safe hands with Whaley a man unafraid of capturing the class-based absurdities of British life." - PAJ Newman

"When describing Foraging for Murder to both Spouse-Critter and one of my besties, I found myself saying that it reads like Agatha Christie did the plot outline, handed it to the cast of Monty Python and walked away!" - Puzzle Paws Blog

"Aldermaston had me laughing a few times!" The Page Ladies

"Foraging for Murder is a hilarious, uplifting and thrilling murder mystery sprinkled with plenty of tension, intrigue and suspense to keep readers chewing their nails and on the edge of their seats until the end." Bookish Jottings

"Full of culinary delights and dark deeds past and present, it is jam packed full of wonderful and very likeable eccentric characters with a deliciously wicked streak of humour running through it." The Word Is Out

"Wow. Foraging for Murder is a fantastic book. It's stuffed with some very British quirkiness, rival butchers, an obnoxious new Chief Executive for the local Council, and a slightly bumbling, but good-hearted, member of the nobility, his wife, his eminently competent butler, as well as his extremely eccentric brother." MJ Porter