She spent eighteen years proving that numbers lie. She was not expecting the bees.

When forensic accountant Verity Penhale inherits her great-aunt's Cornish apiary, she is planning on fourteen hives, one bad-tempered cat and no conversation whatsoever.

What she gets is a dead solicitor in her bee house.

He appears to have been stung to death — except that the man was never allergic to anything in his life, and the stings were put there afterwards, one at a time, by somebody who counted them out. There are eleven dead bees on the floor. A real attack would have left eighty.

The village of Honeycombe Bay has decided the newcomer did it. The police are inclined to agree. And the only thing Verity has on her side is the one skill nobody else in Cornwall has: she can read a dead man's accounts and tell you what he was afraid of.

But the deeper she gets into the books, the further back they go — to a name in her great-aunt's ledger that has no business being there, to eleven unanswered letters to a coroner, and to a night in October 2003 when a man drowned off Wrackmoor Head and left his boat tied up at the quay with the fenders down.

A Hive of Trouble is the first Honeycombe Bay Mystery: a British village whodunnit with no gore, no bad language and a closed bedroom door — and a sleuth who solves murders the way she used to catch fraud, one entry at a time.

Perfect for readers of Richard Osman, M. C. Beaton and Agatha Christie.