Julia Bird had imagined the quiet of rural life would be soothing after years in the city, but she finds she canâ??t just sit still. Determined to throw herself into village activities, she joins the library just in time to attend a talk by celebrated local author Vincent Andrews. Charming, devilishly handsome and talented, Vincent teases the crowd with a reading from his forthcoming novel. Set in a village bearing strange similarities to Berrywick, with characters the audience start to recognise, Vincent hints of dark secrets to be revealed, to gasps of outrage from the room. The meeting ends in uproar, and, just hours later, Vincentâ??s dead body is discovered behind the bookshelvesâ?¦ As one of the last people to see him alive, Julia feels morally bound to help the police investigate. With her trusty Labrador, Jake, at her side, she decides to do her own sleuthing and quickly discovers that Vincentâ??s personal life is messy, his finances are in disarray and his book sales are declining. But most of all, remembering her neighboursâ?? faces at the book reading, Julia wonders if one of them could have lost the plot enough to killâ?¦ As Julia interrogates the suspects, she walks straight into another scene of murder and mayhem, and realises Vincentâ??s manuscript is now missing. Thereâ??s someone out there whoâ??s deadly serious about keeping their secrets unpublished. Will Julia be able to stop them,