Edgar Prees, director of the Botanical Gardens In Asslington, is a man of such regular habits that when he is two hours late coming home one evening his daughter becomes quite alarmed. And rightly so, for Prees has, or so It seems, tried to commit suicide by trying to throw himself off a cliff. He is stopped, but the next morning, even as he still seems to be thinking about killing himself, he is murdered. Or does he kill himself?
BBC Everyday Ethics: Assisted Suicide - Right or Wrong?
On this weeks' Everyday Ethics - David Cameron launches an attack on absent fathers, but is his raw language counter-productive? It was one of the most disturbing TV programmes most viewers will have seen for quite some time. This week, the BBC broadcast a documentary about assisted dying, presented by Sir Terry Pratchett, who has Alzheimers, in which we watched the suicide of Peter Smedley. Was it right to do so? And what are the implications from this film?
When the MP for Bootham East was fished out of the Thames, it looked like a clear case of suicide. But as the by-election for his successor got under way, some very murky political waters were stirred up. The local Labour party had been hijacked by the Looney Left, the Tory Party had a most unpleasant young candidate (with dubious City connections) foisted upon it, and the Alliance candidate had something nasty in his past he was trying to conceal. By polling day it was very obvious that the political suicide was no suicide - but murder.
Seventeenth-century Tokyo is the setting for Rowland's debut novel, a murder mystery starring the Senior Police Commander in the district of Edo. Sano Ichiro, a samurai whose academic background puts him at odds with most of his peers, discovers two bodies in the Sumida River, a man and woman bound together in what appears to have been a shinju, or "double love suicide." The man is a peasant, the woman the high-born daughter of an important official. Told by his superior to close the case without an investigation, Sano, suspecting murder, determines to investigate on his own.
It is 1908, and international tensions are mounting as the world plunges toward war. When a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in a sensational apparent suicide, the man's grief-stricken daughter turns to the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency to clear her father's name. Van Dorn puts his chief investigator on the case, and Isaac Bell soon realizes that the clues point not to suicide but to murder. And when more suspicious deaths follow, it becomes clear that someone-an elusive spy-is orchestrating the destruction of America's brightest technological minds... and the murders all connect to a top- secret project called Hull 44.
