Margot McTrusty (Agony Aunt & Private Detective)

At some point in our lives, we’re all guilty of casually glancing through newspaper or magazine Agony Aunt pages and finding perverse entertainment in reading about other people's problems. Even perhaps mentally we store away the ‘expert’ advice, just-in-case we need to call on it in the future. Our resident agony aunt Margot McTrusty is not one to sugar-coat her words as she wades through her bulging postbag, dictating those column inches for her local twice weekly newspaper, the Ethandun Bugler.

Aunt Margot’s brutally frank no-nonsense advice can often read like a personal dressing down. In her defence she maintains her somewhat brusque style is a direct result of her correspondent’s desire to both provoke and annoy her. Providing they’re not on the receiving end of the tongue lashing, her readership regard her replies as hilarious, they're only rarely taken seriously.

Her editorial amanuensis Effie Muttock has the gift of emotional intelligence but sadly in her private life she's a woman with a big problem, her husband Bert. He’s one of life’s really lazy people, only interested in running his Donkey Sanctuary, helped by Effie’s younger cousin Wolfie Thynne. We soon learn that Arthur Piddgeon, Aunt Margot’s errant nephew and cheating proprietor of Piddgeon Detective Agency, has for years been in lust with Effie, ever since he saw her work a ‘pole’ in a night club. Unselfishly he’s offered his services as surrogate father of her yet to be conceived baby.

Our novel is set in North Wiltshire, within the environs of Clench Common and pretty close to the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge. This tale of rural intrigue and chicanery would not be complete without the discovery of a Saxon Chronicler’s clue to a Dark Age treasure trove, buried beneath the fabled King Egbert’s Stones. It was here that King Alfred the Great is said to have rallied his men to defeat the Viking Great Heathen Army of AD878 and so establish Christendom in ‘Albion’.

The problem for the obnoxious chiselling Arthur Piddgeon is an intractable one of how to get at the trove, without attracting the officious attentions of the security company who guard the ancient site. Suddenly we’re off tobogganing at breakneck donkey speed with barely time to read an agony aunt letter, into a surreal world of farce, cliché and indiscretion.