Noose for a Lady (Simon Gale Series Book 1) by Gerald Verner

​    A woman stands accused of murdering her spouse, a thoroughly unlikeable man by all accounts, but apparently still a crime. One she’s to be hanged for as the title suggests despite protesting her innocence, unless her friend Simon Gale miraculously can solve this crime and prove her right. Armed with good intentions and powers of deduction, Gale sets off sifting through the locals to find the guilty one. It’s like a locked village mystery in that way.
   The villagers may be pitchfork free, but they have all kinds of secrets, enough for another dead body to turn up. But in the end everyone gathers around for a dramatic reveal, with a nice genuinely surprising plot twist to boot, and justice is served. Cute, pleasantly British, slightly dated murder mystery of a classic mystery genre variety, a first in the series.  Random kindle freebie that read quickly and entertained sufficiently, which is all you can really ask for with these things.
  Trivia time…women’s death penalty sentences in England in the 1900s had an approximately 90% reprieve rate. Maggie in the book definitely gets the wrong end of that stick. Also, not woman in England has been hanged since 1955. And then the death penalty itself was abolished in 1998. Very progressive, England.  USA, of course, still has the death penalty and some states still permit hanging, though it hasn’t been done since 1996. The more you know…