The book starts off with a fairly decent mystery, two oldsters vanishing without a trace, foul play is suspected. Then the writer fills most of the book with an autobiographical novel (which is by itself not that interesting), finishing up with a few chapters that take up where the story left off...
This is a mystery series opener, introducing Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill who lives in a small village in Suffolk called Breckham Market. His right-hand man is DS Tait, who got his job by way of "graduate entry..., special police training and ... accelerated promotion," (8) and who feels he ...
The skull is buried in the snow. Little Justin and Adrian think at first that it's a football -- but footballs don't have eyeless, noseless sockets and grinning teeth. Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill is the first policeman on the scene. He finds the skeleton of what appears to be a y...
Derek and Christine Cartwright live in a lovely house in the Suffolk village of Wyveling. When Christine's mother, Enid, arrives for a visit, Derek welcomes her warmly, but when an accident makes her a permanent resident, Derek's nightmare begins -- horrible dreams of strangling Enid to death. Wh...
For whom the bell tolls. — Cuthbert "Clanger" Bell, the town drunk, died exactly as everyone in Breckham Market had predicted: he staggered out of his favorite pub and into the path of an oncoming car. Three respected citizens witnessed the incident, and all called it an accident. But Eunice Bell...
Beryl Websdell’s garden gnome has been kidnapped and she has received a ransom note demanding jelly beans as payment and the gnome will be returned to her. At the same time her daughter disappears, three days before her wedding. Has her daughter been kidnapped as well? Beryl doesn’t believe so...
He chose to walk rather than ride. Unwilling to believe that all Castleacre considered his brother a murderer, he wanted to meet the eyes of everyone he came upon. But where yesterday there had been smiles and greetings, today there were none. Townspeople pointed him out c...
He tossed and muttered, then slept heavily, right through the alarm. He got up in a rush, hollered at Peter for being in the bathroom when he wanted to use it, snapped at his wife for not rousing him earlier, and scalded the roof of his mouth with hot tea. It was a bad way to start the morning. B...
Very kind of you.’ It had been Quantrill’s intention to meet Pc Godbold at the Ashthorpe Chequers before going to interview the dead girl’s parents, but the constable had forewarned his wife to provide coffee and sandwiches. Preferable, anyway, on this occasion, to a pub snack; bad enough to have...