The Obituary Was Early

The obituary was wrong. The dead man was very much alive. By the next morning, he wasn't.

Mabel and Edward Finch have spent decades running the Tetherington Chronicle, recording the births, marriages, scandals and everyday dramas of their quiet English market town. They know everyone has a story.

They also know an obituary should never be published before its subject is dead.

So when retired headmaster Laurence French walks into their newspaper office to complain about the obituary announcing his death, Mabel is mortified. Someone has slipped a false notice into the paper, and stranger still, parts of the life described in it do not belong to Laurence at all.

At first, it looks like an embarrassing mistake.

Then Laurence is found murdered.

Suddenly, the premature obituary feels far less innocent.

Determined to discover how the false notice reached their newspaper, Mabel and Edward begin following the details hidden between its lines. Their search leads through old photographs, forgotten newspaper reports, community rivalries and a twenty-five-year-old story that Tetherington has repeated for so long that nobody thinks to question whether it was ever true.

But in a town where everyone knows everyone, secrets have a way of becoming local history.

And someone is desperate to keep this particular version of the past intact.

Warm, witty and packed with fair-play clues, The Obituary Was Early is a British cosy murder mystery featuring an affectionate husband-and-wife sleuthing duo, a charming small-town setting, buried secrets, suspicious neighbours and a puzzle where the smallest detail might change the whole story.

Because sometimes the most dangerous thing a newspaper can print is the truth.