This is an "English, tea-based mystery" that lets you help solve the mystery as you read. It takes place in England and I wish the Royal Tunbridge Wells Museum was a real place, as it would be a place I would have loved to visit. You learn a lot about tea and since I enjoy a good 'cuppa' tea, this story was very interesting to me.

NIgel is a new acting director of a tea museum (even though he is a coffee man himself). Flick Adams is an American who is the tea curator, and who also knows a bit about forensic chemistry. When one of the board of trustees is found dead in the midst of a board meeting, most think it was a heart attack. But Flick knows the signs of poison and sets out to prove that Dame Elspeth did not die of a heart attack, but was poisoned. Nigel also has concerns as Elspeth had told Nigel before the meeting that she had found a thief on the board of trustees and was going to reveal who it was. This will cause Nigel and Flick to work together to uncover the mystery of who killed Elspeth and why.

Although it took me a good while to get into this story, once I did I enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on, just like Nigel and Flick were doing in the story. I also liked watching these two recognize and appreciate each other and start a little bit of a romance going between them. Tea lovers and mystery readers will enjoy! ( )

This book takes place at the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum, where we meet Nigel Owen and Felicity Adams, the acting director and chief curator, respectively. A member of the Board of Trustees dies at a trustee meeting, and only Felicity Adams suspects that she was murdered.

When I first started to read this book, I did NOT like it. It seemed just another author unsuccessfully trying to write a cozy mystery. Neither Nigel nor Felicity was likeable, and the writing did not flow very well. The dialog did not seem to ring true. I sometimes think of myself as a mystery "snob" because I prefer Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Heyer, etc to more modern authors of the genre. However, about halfway through the book, I realized I had started to enjoy it.

Granted this book will never win any prizes, but it had a passable mystery, with some fairly decent clues that was solved by Nigel and Felicity in the end. It was a pleasant little book and I will likely read the next in the series, if only to find out what happens between Nigel and Felicity.

As for the Christian Fiction aspect of the book, if this tag scares you off, you should not let it. Most of the Christian aspect plays into the mystery, and the only part that really stuck out as not belonging is when Nigel asks Felicity on a date to Church at the end. ( )

Felicity "Flick" Adams, an American, is the chief curator of a tea museum in Royal Tunbridge Wells, England. Coffee-loving Nigel Owen is the acting director. Dame Elspeth Hawker, a descendant of the man for whom the museum is named, dies at a meeting of the museum's directors, and Flick is convinced it is poison. Most everyone tends to disagree with her since one of the directors is a medical doctor and attributed the death to natural causes. Flick is determined to investigate on her own. Like many works of Christian fiction, the writing leaves much to be desired. The narrative did not flow as smoothly as it should have. At first I really disliked Nigel Owen, but his character grew on me. The authors did show some skill in constructing clues throughout the book that would prove important later on. I am not convinced that the ending would have played out the way it did. It seemed a bit of a let-down. ( )