Vali Noir And The Hunt Ball Poisoner: Ren Morton. 1970s UK woman PI and her Met trained poodle solve crimes in the Chilterns Underbelly!

One dead lord. One dirty county. No clean exits.

On the night of the Amersham Hunt Club's fifty-third annual ball, Lord Pemberton Ashcroft-Hale dies in front of two hundred witnesses. The grimace on his face says poison before the pathologist does.

What looks like a society murder — jealousy, old money, a scorned mistress with a motive that would satisfy any jury — turns out to have something much larger underneath it. Twenty years of organised crime, buried in the Chilterns chalk. Shell companies, corrupt planning committees, a canal network moving things that shouldn't be moved.

The murder case closes cleanly. The one beneath it does not.

Vali Noir and the Hunt Ball Poisoner is the first in the Vali Noir Investigates series: hardboiled PI fiction set in 1970s rural England, where the landscape is pretty, the institutions are rotten, and the only reliable partner has four legs and a Scotland Yard pension.