Hot Chocolate & Nasty Business
“Imagine Richard Osman wandering into a Hallmark film and discovering organised crime”
A Christmas crime comedy
Judith McCulloch grows Christmas trees in the Galloway hills. Her dad drowned in Loch Ken in February, and she’s been running the farm alone ever since. Then a solicitor in Castle Douglas tells her she only owns half of it.
The other half belongs to Archie Ashby, a primary school teacher from Norfolk who has seen a lot of Christmas films. He’s fairly sure he knows how this one goes: snow on the hills, a village fayre, and a prickly woman in a red scarf.
What he doesn’t know about is the new padlock on the slurry pit. Judith doesn’t know about it either. Not yet.
A festive novella about grief, inheritance, a monster pike, and what two old men got up to one night in a byre. It was meant to be a cheerful Christmas book. It didn’t quite manage it.
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Who Is Peter Bestel?
I’m a man in my early sixties living in rural southwest Scotland with my wife, Heather.
I’ve spent a lifetime working, raising a family, leaving the city, and starting more projects than I’ve finished. Somewhere along the way I started reaching conclusions about the world, the internet and getting older. I’m still regularly proved wrong about them.
That’s what my YouTube channel is for: personal video essays where I say what I think and then argue with myself out loud. Galloway sits behind me while I do it.
I also write fiction. My first novel, Hot Chocolate & Nasty Business, is a Christmas crime comedy with a gritty edge, set in Galloway and featuring a turkey mobster called Victor Howlett. It’s out now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. There are dozens more ideas behind it, some nearly finished, some barely sketched.
Here's another Thing I Made
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become increasingly interested in the questions that don’t have quick answers. Questions about what matters, what is enough, and how we want to spend the years ahead.
I created these prompts as a way of exploring those questions for myself. If you’re asking some of the same things, perhaps you’ll find them useful too.
