Detective Inspector Charlie Peace and his wife, Felicity, are shocked when Felicity's difficult dad, Rupert Coggenhoe, suddenly announces that he's moving north to their Yorkshire village. Felicity has never much liked her father, and to have him as a near-neighbor fills her with foreboding. The boorish old man has always loved to impress the ladies, young and old, by exaggerating his modest success as a novelist. True to form, soon after his move to Slepton Edge he surrounds himself with adoring females, including a precocious, theatrical teenager named Anne Michaels. Rupert and Anne could make a lethal combination.
When Rosemary Sheffield, the vicar's wife, loses her religious faith, it is far from a personal matter. When a body is found after a church fete it is up to Detective Constable Charlie Pearce and his boss Mike Oddie to discover whether Rosemary's spiritual crisis has led to murder.
Scotland Yard is keeping tabs on suave, wily antique-book dealer Gerald Suzman, involved in several lucrative literary seams over the years and now the creator of the Sneddon Fellowship, celebrating the novels of Susannah Sneddon. The Fellowship's center is the bleak farmhouse in West Yorkshire where, 50 years ago, Susannah and her brother,
Many years ago, Yorkshire writer Joshua Sneddon killed his more successful sister with an ax, then shot himself in the head. Now a yahoo entrepreneur has taken a sudden interest in the obscure literary Sneddons, and Detective Constable Charlie Peace wonders why.
No one loved the murdered Dame Myra Mason, long-ago plaything of now senile Benedict Cotterel. Myra's estranged, illegitimate daughter plans a scathing biography; Benedict's dangerously stupid legitimate daughter blames the woman for stealing her father; and Myra's new husband admits to marrying for career advancement. Tucked away upstairs in the Old Rectory, Maudsley, Benedict himself supposedly knows nothing. Barnard shows rare form as usual, investing his English village world with memorable class types, sly quirks, and supporting characters, all limned in masterfully efficient prose.
