Matt & Mollie kick off Novel Idea with a brilliantly ill-advised challenge: write a novel together, one chapter at a time, with no planning, alternating weekly. Steffan Powell joins as narrator, referee and professional reader-out-louder, steering them away from Mollie’s romcom instincts and Matt’s action fantasies and into what “everybody loves”: murder.
A coin toss crowns Matt as Chapter One author, and he introduces us to Detective Ian Chalk at Willow Manor, where the wealthy Augustus Smythe has supposedly died in a freak accident involving a paper shredder and a tie. Chalk’s dramatic “will reveal” goes wrong when the document he triumphantly retrieves from a grandfather clock turns out to be a parish newsletter celebrating the housekeeper Mrs Paisley’s record-breaking tomato. Enter Chalk’s new partner, D.I. Brie Rockfort, who produces the real will — painstakingly pieced back together after being shredded — and raises the stakes with a bombshell: Augustus Smythe may not have died accidentally after all. The chapter ends with the household summoned to the study, now an official crime scene, as Mollie prepares to take over Chapter Two with a major plot point, a character deep-dive, and a scene of conflict.
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