Book Review: The Brewery Murders by J. R. Ellis

  Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook, free of charge, from Amazon Publishing UK, via #netgalley, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it. All opinions are my own.

An award-winning beer worth killing for. Can DCI Oldroyd find the killer before last orders?

Synopsis:

Steeped in a history of award-winning Yorkshire ale, the town of Markham boasts not one but two breweries. Richard Foster runs one; his sister, Emily, along with her partner, Janice, runs the other. And not without some resentment.

The unwelcome return of the town’s former bad boy, Brendan Scholes, threatens to ignite the sibling rivalry further. Scholes claims to have found the long-lost secret recipe to the beer that made Richard and Emily’s father famous, and he wants money.

But it isn’t long before Scholes’ body is found floating in a fermentation tank at one of the breweries, his head caved in by a hammer. DCI Oldroyd and Andy Carter are called in to investigate the murder, and there’s no shortage of suspects.

As rumours of the possible existence of a recipe for the famous beer spread against a backdrop of growing homophobia and misogyny, tempers run high. With Markham’s beer industry at stake, a killer on the loose and the town’s residents out for blood, Oldroyd needs to solve the murder before someone else is killed…

Review:

 This is book 9 in the series and it's a bit of a twist to the normal routine. Oldroyd and Carter step into more than they expected when there is a death in the brewery. Old scores and secrets are causing issues and drama in modern day, and quite possibly now murder. Can they solve the mystery before more people die? It's a bit of a roller coaster toward the end, with the reader pretty sure they know who the killer is, but not truly WHY. Fun for new fans and old!

About the Author:

John R. Ellis has lived in Yorkshire for most of his life and has spent many years exploring Yorkshire’s diverse landscapes, history, language and communities. He recently retired after a career in teaching, mostly in further education in the Leeds area. In addition to the Yorkshire Murder Mystery series, he writes poetry, ghost stories and biography. He has completed a screenplay about the last years of the poet Edward Thomas and a work of faction about the extraordinary life of his Irish mother-in-law. He is currently working (slowly!) on his memoirs of growing up in a working-class area of Huddersfield in the 1950s and 1960s.