‘Excellent . . . Fans of golden age mysteries will be delighted’ Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Ten historical mysteries. Over 2000 pages. Two chalk-and-cheese detectives. Many hours of high-quality mystery reading.
Lincolnshire, England, 1928. Builders lift the flagstones in a narrow yard and uncover three bodies in shallow graves. A woman, a young man and a seven-year-old girl.
The local police are out of their depth. Scotland Yard sends Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone and Sergeant Mickey Hitchens north with the famous murder bag.
Henry came back from the trenches changed. Precise, contained, hard to read. He works a crime scene like a scientist: fingerprints, photographs, bloodstains, fibres, every detail copied into the black-bound murder book he keeps in his own hand.
Mickey is his opposite: a proper East End copper. Henry reads evidence. Mickey reads people. Between them, very little stays buried.
But the bodies in the yard are only the beginning.
Across ten atmospheric cases, the investigations move from hard-up terraced streets and Lincolnshire market towns to south-coast sands, smoke-blackened factory districts, country houses and the glittering world of the bright young things.
This is England between the wars: uneasy, divided, still haunted by the trenches, where the old order and the fast new set both have secrets worth killing for.
Classic British detection in the Golden Age tradition. Perfect for readers of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, and for fans of Charles Todd, Jacqueline Winspear and Frances Brody.
