Joyce Cato

Joyce Cato has lived near Oxford all her life, and started out working (in admin) at both Somerville College and later Wadham College, and so knows Colin Dexter’s (and Morse/Lewis’s) University world very well! Having read and loved the ‘golden age’ novels all her life, she decided to try her hand at writing them, and her first classic whodunit novel, Birthdays Can be Murder was published by Robert Hale.

Joyce enters the more cosy/classic world of the amateur detective. Both her heroines, the travelling cook, Jenny Starling, and vicar’s wife, Monica Noble, solve traditional crimes. In these novels, they battle with the usual mix of red herrings, a handful of likely suspects, and the careful scrutiny of clues, leading them to solve the puzzle as to who killed who, when, where and why.