Great news for fans of mystery series. Alice Castle’s Calamity in Camberwell, the third book in her London Murder Mystery series, officially launches Aug. 13. And the next is not far behind. She and I have a few things in common including a career in journalism, an interest in mystery, and our publisher — Crooked Cat Books.

Before turning to crime, Alice Castle was a UK national newspaper journalist for The Daily Express, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Her first book, Hot Chocolate, set in Brussels and London, was a European hit and sold out in two weeks.

Death in Dulwich was published in September 2017 and has been a number one best-seller in the UK, US, Canada, France, Spain and Germany. A sequel, The Girl in the Gallery was published in December 2017 to critical acclaim. Calamity in Camberwell, the third book in the London Murder Mystery series, is available to pre-order now and will be published Aug. 13, with Homicide in Herne Hill following on Oct. 3. Alice is currently working on the fifth London Murder Mystery adventure, Revenge on the Rye. It will feature Beth Haldane, DI Harry York, a mysterious artist, an ageing Labrador, and an out-of-control cavapoo puppy.

Alice lives in south London and is married with two children, two step-children and two cats.

More about Calamity in Camberwell:

Beth Haldane, SE21’s answer to Miss Marple, worries she is losing a kindred spirit when her friend Jen, the only other single mum in the playground, suddenly gets remarried and moves to nearby Camberwell.

Soon Beth has to face much more pressing fears. Has something gone horribly wrong with Jen’s marriage? What is her new husband really up to? Why is her daughter leading Beth’s son astray? And where on earth IS Jen anyway?

As Beth’s friends push her to start dating again, Beth turns to Met Police DI Harry York for help. But will they solve the mystery in time, or will it turn out that in south east London, not everyone gets to live happily ever after?

About the opening of Calamity in Camberwell:

Calamity in Camberwell opens with Beth Haldane, single mum and amateur sleuth, stuck in traffic – an all-too-familiar experience for anyone who lives in the London suburbs. But this brief hiatus in Beth’s busy day, between rushing around looking after her son, Ben, and working as the archivist at prestigious local school, Wyatt’s, gives Beth the time to reflect on recent changes in her life. Her good friend, Jen, has remarried and moved away. Meanwhile Ben is about to take school entrance exams which will map out his future. Beth is poised to make some difficult, potentially life-changing decisions – and, as usual, she is worrying about every single one.

What she hoped to accomplish with the opening:

In the opening pages of Calamity in Camberwell, my aim is briefly to reacquaint the reader with Beth, the heroine of the books, and then throw them right into her latest dilemmas. She starts off worrying about her son, but ends the chapter thinking seriously about her friend, who has just got married for the second time and should be glowing – but is she? This nagging doubt sows a seed. Beth is a worrier by nature, but is this more evidence of her own inability to relax and trust others, or is she right to be concerned? She is also intrigued, yet terrified, by the idea of dating herself, when friends suggest it’s about time she got out there herself, eight years after the death of her husband.

Was it spontaneous?

“I love writing these London Murder Mystery stories and, once I had the initial idea for Calamity in Camberwell, Beth very kindly wrote it for me herself. I had to make a few changes here and there but at this stage, we know each other pretty well. She’s a lot more reckless than I am, as you’ll see. Sometimes I just have to cover my eyes while she gets on with it.”

Excerpt from Calamity in Camberwell:

Beth Haldane leaned forward in the driver’s seat to twiddle the car radio dial. We found love in a hopeless place was blasting out of the tinny speakers of her Fiat 500. She knew some Dulwich wags would say the lyrics were hilariously appropriate for a visit to her newlywed friend, Jen Patterson, in Camberwell, but Beth wasn’t like that. The area, with its wide Georgian streets, herds of red buses sweeping towards central London and the optimistically-named Butterfly Walk shopping centre, was fine, absolutely fine – though of course it wasn’t quite SE21. But she still loathed the song.

Just as she’d found the comfortingly stuffy tones of Gardener’s Question Time instead, the car in front of her shuffled forward a couple of feet and she had to follow suit, slamming the car into gear, lurching on a little, then yanking the handbrake on again. Oh, the joys of the rush hour. Though why it was called that, when no one was able to rush at all, was one of life’s mysteries, she thought, with a flick of her heavy pony tail. Maybe it was the whoosh of drivers’ blood pressure ascending, as the centipede of traffic wound its way down East Dulwich Grove, past the no-nonsense gates of the College School and the red brick behemoth that was the old Dulwich Hospital.

Calamity in Camberwell buy links:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DP3KG84?tag=geolinker-21
https://www.MyBook.to/CiC

Launch date:

The book is available to pre-order NOW but is published Aug. 13.

Social media links

Alice is also a parent blogger and book reviewer via her website: https://www.alicecastleauthor.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alicecastleauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DDsDiary?lang=en

Links to buy first two books in the London Murder Mystery series:

http://www.MyBook.to/GirlintheGallery

http://www.myBook.to/1DeathinDulwich.

Previous novel: http://www.myBook.to/HotChocolate