The Crime Club
5 total works
Retired Andrew Basnett returns to Knotlington, where he once worked as an assistant lecturer, to an old friend who needs some advice. Two years earlier a member of the Fine Arts Department was murdered. Yet the killer had been caught and sentenced, so why should Andrew's friend need help?
Many believed Stephen Sharland, who is serving a life sentence for the murder, was innocent. But before Andrew even begins making enquiries, there is another murder, and Andrew finds him in a complex web of emotion, struggling to sift truth from lies.
Professor Alistair Dirke thought himself a reasonable man - he could scarcely acknowledge the suspicion that was beginning to grow in his mind every time he saw his wife Rose with Paul Eckleston . . . Paul seemed to be there very often these days.
Yet soon a more terrible suspicion was to grow and spread through the little community of Rollway, where the Dirkes had lived in peace with their neighbours. A valuable collection of coins goes missing and then a man is murdered.
Andrew Basnett, retired botany professor, accompanies an old friend, whose sister has received a blackmail letter, to her home in a Berkshire village. The letter had obviously been put in the wrong envelope, but it seems to indicate that a murder has been committed in Lindleham, where, strangely, several people are missing.
But as Andrew quietly investigates the neighbours, the realisation dawns that his friends, too, have something to hide.