Murder Dancing by Lesley Cookman
A Libby Sarjeant Murder Mystery Book 16

Max Tobin brings his all-male dance company to Steeple Martin, with his new ballet Pendle, based on the infamous Pendle Witch Trials, due to be performed at the Oast Theatre. There have been unpleasant incidents during rehearsals in London, and Max asks Libby Sarjeant and her friend Fran Wolfe to look into them. To everyone’s surprise, the seriousness of the incidents escalates until, inevitably, someone is murdered.

While the police look into the murder, Libby and Fran wonder why someone seemed so set against the ballet. Were occult forces at work, or was there a more worldly, personal motive?

First, thank you for inviting me to your blog for the first stop on my blog tour. I’m delighted to be here, as my books are now published in the US by Start publishing http://accentpress.start-publishing.com/book/2554/

For those that don’t know me, I’m a British author writing very traditional mysteries, which I didn’t know were “cosies” when I first began! The term was coined in the US and took the British a long time to adopt, which we were forced to do because of the categorising in bookshops and later, on the internet. Many people over here are still not familiar with the term.

I was inspired by the work of the Golden Age writers, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. I had two favourite American authors, John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson and Rex Stout, but this probably owed more to my parents’ bookshelves than my own taste as a nine year old! It never occured to me that I could make a living writing them, although I wrote almost as voraciously as I read as a child. My style still has a feeling of a childhood adventure series, and one reviewer said, to my delight (although he didn’t mean it as a compliment!) “Enid Blyton with gin instead of ginger beer”! I love children’s books almost as much as I love mysteries.

I still have to suppress my instinctive feeling that no one will ever believe these stories – after all, readers of books featuring amateur sleuths have been suspending disbelief for years! Having squashed that worry, I then have to find new situations for a murder to occur. My eldest son is very helpful here – he frequently comes up with a basic idea, although he has no idea how to go on from there! Although I stick to the rules of our sub-genre and don’t go in for the overly grisly, some of the subjects I tackle can be difficult and I try not to sanitise them.

Murder Dancing is the sixteenth full length adventure for Libby Sarjeant, although she has appeared in an anthology of short stories and a Christmas novella, too. I hope you enjoy it.

About the Author

A former actor, model and freelance journalist, Lesley Cookman lives on the Kent coast in the UK, has four musicians as children, two small grandchildren and two cats, Lady Godiva and Gloria. All 14 of her Libby Sarjeant books have reached number one in their genre charts on Amazon UK.

Webpage – http://www.lesleycookman.co.uk/
Blog – http://lesleycookman.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/news
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/SteepleMartinMysteries?fref=ts
Twitter – @LesleyCookman

One lucky winner will receive an ebook copy of Murder Dancing by Lesley Cookman. For your chance to win, please enter below. Contest will run until 11:59PM EST on 4/15/16. Winner will be notified via email and will have 48 hours to respond before a new winner is selected. Good luck!

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