Nineteen years of book club. Seven meetings that mattered. And not one of them had ever met.

In February 2006, Margo Prentice's husband signed her up to an online book club she did not want to join, by leaving the details under the fruit bowl where she would have to move fruit to read them.

There were eleven members. By December there were four.

A retired chemistry teacher in Ohio. A theatre critic in Yorkshire who says the unforgivable thing and is usually right. A quantity surveyor in Kent who says almost nothing at all. A woman in Wagga Wagga who has never held a paid job and reads a household the way other people read a menu. And Marion, who organised everything.

They talked every Wednesday for nineteen years. They were never once in the same room.

BEFORE BERYL is the prequel to the Gadabout Club cozy mystery series — seven Wednesdays across nineteen years, from a Flash plug-in that crashed if six people spoke at once, to a folder in a woman's handwriting telling four strangers where to go without her.

This is the origin story, not a murder mystery — there is no body in it. It ends at the arrivals gate at Heathrow, on the morning the first book begins.

Includes the complete first chapter of ON A BUS CALLED BERYL, book one of The Gadabout Club.

For readers of Richard Osman, Faith Martin and Helena Dixon.

Before Beryl

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