Rebecca Tope

Rebecca Tope says of her career that she ‘blundered accidentally into writing crime fiction’, but with two popular crime fiction series to her name – those following the ventures of house-sitter Thea Osborne in the Cotswolds and florist Persimmon ‘Simmy’ Brown in the Lake District – she has become one of the UK’s bestselling authors....

Born in 1948, Tope grew up in rural Cheshire and Devon – surroundings not dissimilar to those of her most-famed protagonists – and her memories of young animals, idyllic summers and harvest time found their way into her first novel, A Dirty Death. Published in 1999 it was the first of Tope’s seven West Country mysteries and sees farmer’s daughter Lilah try to discover who, among his many enemies, murdered her father.

Tope’s ongoing Cotswold Mysteries, which currently stands at 21 titles, began in 2004 with A Cotswold Killing. Set in the quintessentially English village of Duntisbourne Abbots, the novel presents recently widowed house-sitter Thea with a local tragedy and ignites a penchant for amateur detection that has seen her solve numerous mysteries across the area.

Further north, but no less replete with seemingly tranquil settings and murderous intent, the Lake District is home to florist Simmy Brown. New to the area in 2012, Simmy is providing the flowers for the wedding of a local millionaire’s daughter in the first novel of the series, The Windermere Witness, but the celebration ends in heartbreak when the bride’s brother is murdered. Simmy is drawn further into the family’s story when she witnesses another death, and before long is entangled in a series of sinister events, currently running to 12 books with a 13th, The Borrowdale Body, set for release in 2024.

Now releasing two titles a year, Tope finds inspiration for her writing while walking her dogs early in the morning and also runs Praxis Books – a small press that concentrates almost exclusively on reissuing the works of Sabine Baring-Gould, whose novels, short stories and hymns run into the hundreds.