A Ghost Hunter's Guide to Solving a Murder

Meet Alma Timperley. She can:
- Run a hotel
- Solve a mystery
- Talk to ghosts...?

December, 1914: After the death of her aunt, Alma Timperley is surprised when she suddenly finds herself the heiress to the Timperley Spiritualist Hotel in a pretty coastal town in Cornwall.

But not everything is as it seems... the hotel offers guests a very special service: the chance to communicate with the dead.

When the body of one of the hotel's maids is found, it is considered a tragic wartime accident. But the more Alma and the local police try to fathom what happened, the more they begin to realise this is much more than just a death - there might be a German spy in Falmouth.

With the stakes higher than ever, Alma must grapple with her own extraordinary secret if she is going to have more than a ghost of a chance of solving the mystery.

Being able to talk with the dead is one thing; solving their murder is positively ghoulish...

F. H. Petford ran his own creative agency and was involved in writing projects for corporate clients and the London theatre world.
A Ghost Hunter's Guide to solving a Murder, the first of the Alma Timperley mysteries, was written following the success of three crime novels set in the Oxfordshire village of Great Tew at the end of the Great War. The supernatural elements in his work are inspired by his own experiences of the paranormal.
He was signed to Hodder and Stoughton in 2025 and lives a quietly pagan life in Somerset.