The Coffee Shop Detectives: Louise Mumford
The Coffee Shop Detectives is my newest work, an Audible Original read by Alison Steadman.
In the quaint streets of South-West London, four women in their sixties are about to embark on the heist of a lifetime. Meet the Crones (as they gleefully call themselves):
Delilah, the impulsive mastermind.
Orla, the razor-sharp retired teacher.
Maz, the anxious caterer riddled with self-doubt…
and Beth, battling a deadly brain tumour.
United by forty years of friendship, and desperate to raise funds for Beth’s healthcare, the Crones set about a daring plan to steal a priceless brooch from Hawling House.
But this is no ordinary theft. It’s a mission to right a decades-old wrong – the ‘death’ of their friend Ronnie at the hand of the mansion’s enigmatic owner, Edgar Hawling.
As the Crones navigate secret passages, outsmart security, and showcase some of the most cunning catering skills Twickenham has ever seen, they quickly find themselves in a race against time and tugging at the threads of a far more treacherous tapestry than they ever imagined.
Read on for an extract from the very beginning of the book.
***
The rage had always been inside her. Waiting.
When she first heard the soft scraping at her front door at two o’clock in the morning, Delilah King had expected to feel fear. That would have been normal: to freeze, to cry, to have a panic attack, to want to hide or run, her heart thumping like a fist.
But instead she put her book to one side, turned down her reading lamp and let the righteous anger flood her as she listened to her front door give way.
Once, a while ago, Delilah had read that anything used as a weapon in the home should be something a person would feasibly have in the house anyway. She was sixty-six and so society practically expected her to own a rolling pin, though she had never baked anything in her entire life and had no wish to do so. Without making any sound she threw the covers back and reached into the drawer under her bed. The rolling pin was made of marble and was heavy in her hand, weighty enough to be a credible deterrent to any would-be thief.
She nudged her slippers out of the way, wanting to be sure-footed.
There were two of them. She heard their footsteps crossing back and forth in her ground-floor flat as they sifted through her belongings, deciding what to take. Her television. Her mobile phone. Her purse. Her bank cards.
She tiptoed to her bedroom door and listened as one said to the other in a low gruff voice, “The old bat probably won’t even hear us…”
There was a snigger in response. “Probably deaf.”
It took Delilah a moment to realise that the ‘old bat’ in question meant her. It was the first time she had ever heard anyone refer to her like that and there was a dismissive flick to those words that stung. She gripped the rolling pin more firmly in her hands.
Old bat? Well, her hearing was just fine and now they had given her no choice.
She could sit here and wait for them to creep into this room, aiming for her jewellery perhaps: the ring from her mum, the brooch from her grandmother, little shiny pieces of her heart tucked away in velvet. She could sit and wait for them to do something even worse…
Or…
The bubbling, beautiful rage had already made the decision for her. This old bat could still draw blood.
From beyond the door she could hear drawers being opened and the bright tinkling smash of something dropping to the ground, followed by a volley of muttered swearing. What they didn’t steal, they seemed intent on breaking and that only made Delilah’s rage burn more fiercely.
It was reckless, dangerous even. But, right now, in this moment, Delilah didn’t care. She had spent far too much of her life considering consequences, mulling over options and playing by the rules.
But, despite all of that, people were in her house anyway, stealing her belongings.
The scream came from somewhere deep inside her. She yelled it as she barged out of her bedroom brandishing the rolling pin and did not stop yelling it as she flew into the living room like a wraith, a banshee, a demon set loose from the very bowels of hell. She was prepared to beat with her rolling pin until she felt bones break.
She wanted to hear something snap.
And so she was rather disappointed that the two men, black-clad with matching beer bellies, took one look at the whirlwind of a woman hurtling towards them and promptly fled, leaving her broken door wide open. The cool night air swept in and Delilah was left alone on her front step as a car screeched away, its brake lights two red eyes in the dark.
Her hurtle became a stumble, which faltered to a stop. She breathed heavily, looking around for something else to smash. Coming back into her living room she noted the empty space on her coffee table where her laptop had been. New. Ridiculously expensive, but she had justified the cost because she had been toying with the idea of doing some kind of online degree, a way to keep her brain busy. She had hardly even figured out how to use the darn thing.
Then she closed the door and piled a load of furniture in front of it, the best she could do before she could get it fixed the next day, and she sat, wide awake in the glow of her reading lamp, still clutching her rolling pin.
Delilah was not afraid the thieves would come back.
Oh no. Not at all.
She was willing them to.
Because then she could demonstrate just what kind of rage a woman in her sixties was capable of.
***
Louise lives in Cardiff with her husband and spends her time trying to get down on paper all the marvellous and frightening things that happen in her head.
Louise’s debut novel, Sleepless, a “frighteningly inventive” thriller inspired by her own insomnia, was published in December 2020 by HQ HarperCollins. A UK Amazon Kindle Top 50 bestseller, it was the Asda Karin Slaughter Killer Read for July 2021. This was followed by Kindle bestsellers The Safe House, The Hotel, and The Festival. Her new Audible Original The Coffee Shop Detectives, read by Alison Steadman, is an Audible Original No:1 and hit No:5 most listened to in the entire Audible chart. It has been picked as one of Audible’s Best Of The Year (So Far) 2026 and is about to be translated into French, German, Spanish and Italian.
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