Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Chief Inspector's Daughter
There is no shortage of suspects when Jasmine Woods – an attractive, successful romantic novelist – is found by her anguished young secretary, Alison, savagely murdered. Though men were attracted to her and women liked her company, their feelings were often ambivalent, as Alison’s father, Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, and his clever young assistant, Martin Tait, both observed at a party celebrating Jasmine’s latest novel. Her cousin, a failed playwright, resented her riches; her neighbour, intellectual television pundit Jonathan Elliott, despised her kind of fiction; his feminist wife Roz hated its old-fashioned message. Even Quantrill himself resented the fact that his wife was...
Fate Worse Than Death
In the hottest summer for half a century, someone kidnaps Beryl Websdell’s garden gnome, leaving a ransom note demanding half a pound of jelly babies for its return. Beryl is upset, and so are her neighbours in the rural Suffolk village where she lives, because the gnome disappeared three days after her daughter also went missing. Beryl doesn’t think her daughter has been kidnapped . . . not really . . . but she is worried. And so are the police. Inspector Martin Tait is holidaying in the neighbourhood at the time, visiting his elderly Aunt Con form whom he hopes one day to inherit a lot of money. That, when it happens, will suit his plans to become a very young and very wealthy Chief Co...
This Way Out
A decent and happily married man, Derek Cartwright finds himself dreaming of murdering his resident mother-in-law. And when by chance he meets the repellent Hugh Packer, a stranger who is also lumbered with an elderly dependent, what had merely been a midnight fantasy suddenly seems a practical possibility. Like latter-day ‘strangers on a train’, they could swap murders. That is Packer’s idea, anyway: ‘You’ve got a problem, I’ve got a problem, and together we’ve come up with the perfect solution. The sooner we get the jobs done the better.’ Derek Cartwright knows he can never bring himself to murder anyone – not even an old man incapacitated by a stroke. But each time he th...
Blood on the Happy Highway
In a copse near a busy Suffolk road, a body has been found neatly parcelled in plastic. And headless. Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill and his team have been working on the case for two months without a single lead. Sharing Quantrill’s office, and replacing cocky young Martin Tait, is a new detective sergeant, who has shoulder-length dark hair and a good deal of cool competence. Hilary Lloyd makes Quantrill feel uncomfortable. Not that he has anything against women detectives, of course . . . but how can he share with her the easy camaraderie that team-working should involve? This new constraint at work combines with the apparently insoluble murder to make Quantrill unusually gl...
Who Saw Him Die?
Clanger Bell, Breckham Market’s well-known drunk, is run over and killed as he staggers across the street at closing time. It seems to everyone – to town residents, the police, and to Clanger’s only relative, his sister Miss Eunice Bell – that his death was an accident, brought upon himself by his drunken folly. Certainly no one blames the unfortunate driver, a newly rich and newly married man called Jack Goodrum who has recently bought a large house in the town. So when Miss Bell changes her mind, and calls in Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill and his attractive Sergeant, Hilary Lloyd, to announce that she is convinced that the ‘accident’ was in fact murder, the two de...
Cross My Heart and Hope To Die
Ziggy and Gladys Crackjaw, in their late seventies, living in squalid isolation on the outskirts of Byland, a remote East Anglian village, suddenly disappear. Their pension books on the living room mantelpiece, indicative of an intended return, mystify the local police in the persons of Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, Head of Breckham Market CID, and his cool and elegant sergeant, Hilary Lloyd. Do the smears of blood on the floor and iron fender in front of the fireplace indicate domestic violence? Janet Thacker, the brisk village sub-postmistress, who spent her youth in Byland but who now pretends to know nothing about the Crackjaws and their eight children, is Hilary Lloyd’s first target for interrogation. The extraordinary story of a primitive yet aspiring rural childhood and adolescence emerges from the pages of a ‘stolen’ manuscript to lead Quantrill and Lloyd to a solution to the mystery of the missing Crackjaws. In this lucidly written, heartfelt, dual narrative, Sheila Radley has transcended the boundaries of the traditional crime novel to produce a story of poignant, universal appeal.
Death and the Maiden
Chief Inspector Quantrill was a very sensible policeman. But Shakespeare was not on his beat and he was not sure who Ophelia was. His ignorance embarrassed him when Mary Gedge, the most brilliant young girl in Ashthorpe, was found dead in the river, apparently drowned in shallow water while gathering flowers on May Day morning. Others were quick to see the resemblance, among them Mrs Bloomfield, head of the school where Mary had been a pupil before gaining admission—one of the first girls to do so—to King’s College, Cambridge. Ophelia was a beautiful innocent who fell in love with the wrong man and positively invited him to humiliate and destroy her. But was this true of Mary? And if so, which of her several admirers had caused the tragedy? Quantrill knows the people of Ashthorpe and of Breckham Market—the East Anglian district where he works—almost too well. We, too, get to know the locality as his investigation proceeds and Sheila Radley, taking inspiration from Hamlet, brings her characters vividly to life.
A Talent For Destruction
A clergyman should be above reproach, an example to his flock. But what is Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill to make of the Reverend Robin Ainger, Rector of St Botolph’s in the quiet Suffolk town of Breckham Market, when the good-looking, popular parson lies to the police? With the thawing of prolonged winter snow, the skeleton of a recently dead man has been found in a meadow belonging to the Rectory. Whose is the body, and how did it come there? Both Ainger and his wife Gillian are taut with suppressed hysteria at the discovery. As Quantrill – in the face of carefully framed denials from the Rectory, but with hints that Mrs Ainger’s elderly father knows more than he’s tel...
Death and the Maiden
As the New Magini String Quartet prepares for a performance of Schubert's masterpiece, "Death and the Maiden," which it hopes will resuscitate its faltering career, someone starts picking off members of the string quartet a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Dogged by internal dissension and by a potentially devastating lawsuit from its fired second violinist, the famed New Magini String Quartet is on the brink of professional and personal collapse. The quartet pins its hopes on a multi-media Carnegie Hall performance of Franz Schubert's masterpiece, "Death and the Maiden," to resurrect its faltering fortunes. But as the fateful downbeat approaches, a la Agatha Christie, one by one the quartet's musicians mysteriously vanish, including second violinist, Yumi Shinagawa, former student of renowned blind pedagogue and amateur sleuth, Daniel Jacobus.It is left up to the begrudging Jacobus, with his old friend, Nathaniel Williams, and a new member of the detective team, Trotsky the bulldog, to unravel the deadly puzzle. As usual, it ends up more than Jacobus bargained for.
Scared to Death
None
