The Copper Kettle

Every morning at eight, the clerks of a Cheapside counting house file into Agnes Boyle's teahouse for the same pot of her house blend. This morning, their head clerk is dead at his desk—with Agnes's cup beside him. The police close the Copper Kettle as evidence, and Agnes's eleven years of trade with it. But Agnes knows her own tea, and she knows Mr. Pettigrew was worried about a ledger that didn't add up. With her kitchen boy Pip and her lodger Mrs. Cade, Agnes reopens through the back door and follows a single invoice to a rival importer who has been shorting the counting house for years. The poison wasn't meant for Pettigrew. It was meant to silence him. A Victorian teahouse mystery for readers who like their crimes steeped slowly and solved by hand.