The Secret Of Orchard Cottage By Alex Brown

[amazon_link id=”0007597428″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]‘The Secret of Orchard Cottage’ is the latest book by Alex Brown.

April Wilson is wondering what to do next – her life has been turned upside down after the loss of her husband so she’s hoping to piece herself together again with a visit to her elderly great aunt, Edith. Arriving in the rural idyll of Tindledale, she’s dismayed to find Edith’s cottage and the orchard behind it in a sorry state of disrepair. Edith seems to have lost interest completely, instead she’s become desperate to find out what happened to her sister, Winnie, who disappeared during WWII.
April gets to work immediately, discovering that the orchard still delivers a bumper crop each year, and with the help of some of the villagers – including Matt, the enigmatic Farrier – begins to unravel the mystery of the missing Winnie. Slowly, April can feel things coming to life again – but can Orchard Cottage work its magic on her too?

‘The Secret Of Orchard Cottage’ is the third book in Alex’s Tindledale series and we see ourselves returning to the quaint little village and its haberdashery.

In the latest book, we meet April Wilson, who’s great aunt Edie has been a resident of Tindledale since she was a child. Ever since the loss of her husband Gray, April has been at a loose end, not knowing what to do with herself, she decides a visit to her great aunt Edie is in order. She then sets off for an adventure to Tindledale where she gets much more than she bargained for as she discovers that her aunt isn’t well and has regular lapses of dementia and mistakes April for her older sister Winnie. April wonders about her great aunt Winnie, the woman, she never met who went away to the war and sadly never returned. Rumours surrounded her disappearance but nothing was ever confirmed and April decides to investigate what happened to her great aunt and help Edie find out the truth about her sister. As well as trying to solve the mystery of Winnie, April has also caught the eye of a rebellious teenage girl called Bella, who will only listen to April and refuses to acknowledge her desperate father.

Just like her previous novels, ‘The Secret Of Orchard Cottage’ is another whimsical tale that flows at an easy and gentle pace, that makes the story an intriguing and sweet one. The story introduces April, a new character to the Tindledale series, a kind and heartbroken woman who is not sure what to do with her life, now that her husband has passed away. She finds sanctuary and distraction with looking after her elderly aunt, trying to solve mysteries as well as deal with hormonal teenager, she does all this whilst attracting the attention of Harvey, the boisterous fruit farmer and Matt, Bella’s quiet and brooding father. As well as new characters to the story, it’s nice to see the return of Hettie, the owner of the haberdashery, who makes the reader smile with her sharp tongue and quick wit.

Another thing that is quite clever about the story, is that the inclusion of the mystery of Winnie and her disappearance and this adds an element of intrigue to the story and makes for very interesting reading when everything is revealed.

‘The Secret Of Orchard Cottage’ is a mysterious and charming tale about starting over, love and heroism and is a lovely book to settle down with during the summer nights.

You can buy [amazon_link id=”0007597428″ target=”_blank” ]The Secret of Orchard Cottage from Amazon [/amazon_link] and is available to buy from good bookshops.