Intrigue

Festival organizer Toby Winning is found dead on the morning of the Lower Crosby Folk Festival, shortly after announcing plans to move the festival nearer to London.

Folk festival organizer Toby Winning is found dead, his head held down in a bowl of water also containing eels and eggs. His estranged wife Alice seems unconcerned, unlike co-organizer Brian Grey, who, with Toby, had been planning to move the festival from Lower Crosby to London - to the annoyance of local businessmen including pub landlord Frank Wainwright and sound engineer Danny Carver. Danny is also angry when his daughter Melody takes to the stage playing the guitar once owned by his brother Johnny, a famous folk singer who shot himself. Visiting musician Jay Templeton seems keen to help Melody's career but was expecting something from Toby. Two more deaths follow, both in the manner of murders in a local folk song and to solve them Barnaby must discover the importance of Johnny's lost recording of the Ballad of Midsomer County.—don @ minifie-1

While Little Crosby hosts the Midsommer folk festival, event organizer and serial womanizer Toby Winning is shortly found at home drowned in a bowl of eggs and live eels. The changing MO is inspired, as both following murders, by a line from the famous signature 'Midsommer ballad' by late musician Johnny Carver, whose alleged suicide remains a mystery, while his missing last album is considered priceless. Toby had recently announced plans to relocate the event to London, which would have proved very costly for entrepreneur Frank Wainwright and inconvenience the half town and local folk scene. Johnny's surviving brother, sound engineer Danny Carver, objects to his daughter Meleody playing at the event, let alone date its star Jay Templeton, who is after the lost album. Hotel owner Claire Asher's husband Tom fails to convince her to start over in Spain, and has more reason for jealousy then even he feared. Barnaby and Nelson catch the person responsible after finding the album in a cabin and how it started all with a covered-up murder.—KGF Vissers