Cosy mysteries from the heart of Gascony
Vineyards, village gossip, and the occasional body in the chai.
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Your free story
Winter, 1987. Someone is stealing from the still.
Every winter, Bernard Daubas brings his travelling still through the vineyards of the Ténarèze, farm by farm, as his father did and his grandfather before him. He sleeps for one hour a night, at three in the morning, and everybody knows it.
This winter, somebody is using that hour. A litre of spirit goes missing here, a litre there, and the douanier from Condom is counting. If the figures don’t add up by the night of the Flamme, Bernard loses the family licence.
Long before Harriet Lowe arrives at Peyrelongue, the village’s sharpest pair of eyes belongs to its bouilleur. A warm, wry novella about frost, firelight and the secrets old men keep, and the perfect introduction to the Armagnac Mysteries.
The trilogy
The Armagnac Mysteries
Newly divorced food writer Harriet Lowe buys a crumbling Armagnac estate in a Gascon village on an impulse. She knows a great deal about food and nothing at all about distilling, neighbours, or how many people in Sainte-Aurélie have something to hide.
Book 1 · Winter
The Angels' Share
The night the travelling still arrives at Harriet's new estate, a Parisian dealer who once swindled half the valley is found dead in her chai.
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Book 2 · Spring
Proof of Murder
A man collapses playing with the village band at the May fête, and the poison came from a numbered bottle of Harriet's very first Armagnac.
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Book 3 · Winter
The Final Blend
A sealed cask marked 1944 has waited eighty years to be opened. The night before it is, the man who claims it is found in the village lavoir.
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In Sainte-Aurélie, everyone knows everything. They just don’t tell the English woman.
The Armagnac Mysteries
About Philippa
Bonjour from the Gers.
I’m English, in my fifties, and I live in an old stone farmhouse near Condom, in a corner of South West France most people have never heard of. That suits me very well.
I came here the way people in my books do: on a whim that turned out to be the best decision I ever made. My French is good on paper and wobbly at the boulangerie. I’ve learned what a chai is, why you never ask a Gascon a direct question, and that every village has one person who knows everything. Ours has two.
Harriet Lowe isn’t me, but we share a weakness for local recipes, an inability to leave a question alone, and a habit of standing in the yard in winter waiting for the travelling still to come through the fog.
Philippa
Come and sit by the still.
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