George Gently
31 total works
Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river.
Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that's if you can call having too many suspects, too many potential murderers, 'a good thing'. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim's skull and dump him in the river.
You'll find plenty of bodies stretched out on a summer beach - but they're not usually dead...
In a British seaside holiday resort at the height of the season, you would expect to find a promenade and a pier, maybe some donkeys, 'Kiss-Me-Quick' hats, candy floss and kids building sandcastles. You would not expect to find a naked corpse, punctured with stab wounds, lying on the sand.
Chief Inspector George Gently is called in to investigate the disturbing murder. The case has to be wrapped up quickly to calm the nerves of concerned holidaymakers. No one wants to think that there is a maniac on the loose in the town but with no clothes or identifying marks on the body, Gently has a tough time establishing who the victim is, let alone finding the killer. In the meantime, who knows where or when the murderer might strike again?
Time spent messing about on the river isn't supposed to end with a brutal murder.
The staff at Stoley's Boatyard were used to holidaymakers returning their pleasure cruisers a little late after a week or so exploring the network of waterways around Norchester. They were not used to finding their yachts burned almost beyond recognition with the charred remains of a client still aboard.
Taking on the murder investigation, Chief Inspector George Gently faces an enquiry like no other he has ever handled. Somewhere beneath the lies of the victim's wife, somewhere obscured by the brittle edge of her daughter's fear, somewhere hidden by her son's hysteria, lies the truth.
Gently's only hope is to sweep aside the litter of chaos and confusion to uncover the identity of the killer.
If you were to guess how a womanising, middle-aged brewer was murdered, you might say he was shot by a jealous husband or drowned in his own beer - not savaged by a horse.
The strange death of Charles Berney, savaged and trampled to death by a horse on a windswept stretch of moorland, came as he had apparently settled down with an attractive young wife and was concentrating on developing his business. He may have argued with his wife at her birthday party the night before his death, but when he set off for a business meeting in London the following morning, no one expected him to end up murdered on the moor. How did he get there? The answer comes only after Gently has unravelled one of the most bizarre cases of his entire career
Book 10 in the Chief Inspector George Gently case files finds Gently dodging bullets when he investigates the murder of a trucker who died in a hail of gunfire.
Murdered in a lonely lay-by in the heart of the countryside, the trucker is identified as a Polish immigrant. Was this a revenge killing, a quarrel over money, an underworld execution or something even more sinister?
Having been invited to spend Christmas in the country, fishing for pike, Gently finds himself hunting a completely different predator when a guest at Merely Hall, a nearby stately home, is found dead at the foot of the grand staircase on Christmas morning.
At first the tragedy is assumed to be a simple accident, but Gently is not one to jump to conclusions and is soon in no doubt whatsoever that this was murder.
Merely produces the finest tapestries in England but the threads that Gently must unravel in his investigation are more complex than any weaver's design, with everyone from the lord of the manor to his most lowly servant falling under suspicion.
Praise for Alan Hunter's Gently books:
'It is always a pleasure to look forward to another Gently book by Alan Hunter ...' Police Review
Drifting upstream on the flood-tide in a dank October mist, a loosed dinghy carries the body of a once lovely girl, strangled. No mystery about who she was . . . everyone in the small Suffolk community devoted to music and sailing knew Hannah, the pleasant, reclusive Czech girl who lived alone in a Martello Tower by a lonely stretch of sand and shingle. The question is: who could have wanted her dead?
Chief Superintendent George Gently, now living in the neighbourhood with his new wife, Gabrielle, is busy painting the stairs when the telephone rings: sighing, he agrees to help the local man with the initial stages of the investigation.
But in spite of himself he's drawn into the mystery, as they start to question those who might have known Hannah well. Her ex-husband? Her bookshop employer? The local war-hero? The flashy ex-crook who now runs a pub?
As the river ripples back and forth in the mellow autumnal sunshine, Gently and the lugubrious Inspector Leyston set about piecing together fragments from the dead girl's life: two dinghies drawn up on the riverbank by the church; a rendezvous note; two cigarette ends; a poem in Czech . . . it begins to seem that there was more to Hannah than met the eye. And gradually, into Gently's sympathetic and intuitive mind, understanding flows like the rising tide . . .
When an old man is found dead at the foot of the staircase in his rambling old house, a hint of murder and the lure of hidden treasure draw Gently into the case.
Gently has plenty of suspects for the old man's murder. A warehouse watchman across the street misses nothing that goes on at the house, but can shed no light on the murderer. A local antiques dealer knows a suspicious amount about the house and a good deal more about the treasure that is thought to be hidden within its walls.
When the murderer strikes again, Gently has a high profile case on his hands and faces a night of sheer terror alone in a house whose secret has claimed at least two lives . . .
The death of a young artist leaves Gently desperately piecing together the portrait of a murderer.
When artist Shirley Johnson is murdered and her body dumped outside a provincial police headquarters, Gently is despatched from London to Northshire to take over the investigation. The prime suspect appears to be the woman's husband, a former bomber pilot with a guilty secret, but the other members of the woman's art group also have strong views about her and her controversial final painting - Dark Destroyer. With so many suspects to consider, Gently must get to the bottom of the mystery before the murderer manages to slip through his fingers.
Praise for Alan Hunter's Gently books:
'It is always a pleasure to look forward to another Gently book by Alan Hunter ...' Police Review
A long-dead climber who comes in from the cold brings murder to the mountain air.
Mountaineer Reginald Kincaid was believed to have died during an expedition to climb Mount Everest. It comes as a shock to his fellow climbers when he turns up again 22 years later and the mystery is compounded by the death of Arthur Fleece, Kincaid's climbing partner on the Everest attempt. Fleece falls to his death on Mount Snowdon in an apparent accident, but the feud that had developed between Fleece and the resurrected Kincaid sparks a murder investigation for George Gently with a 'dead' man as the prime suspect.
Praise for Alan Hunter's Gently books:
'It is always a pleasure to look forward to another Gently book by Alan Hunter ...' Police Review
The last thing you need when you're on holiday is to become involved in a murder. For most people, that would easily qualify as the holiday from hell. For George Gently, it is a case of business as usual. The Chief Inspector's quiet Easter break in Norchester is rudely interrupted when a local timber merchant is found dead. His son, with whom he had been seen arguing, immediately becomes the prime suspect, although Gently is far from convinced of his guilt.
Norchester City Police gratefully accept Gently's offer to help investigate the murder, but he soon clashes with Inspector Hansom, the officer in charge of the case. Hansom's idea of conclusive evidence appals Gently almost as much as Gently's thorough, detailed, methodical style of investigation exasperates Hansom, who considers the murder to be a straightforward affair.
Locking horns with the local law is a distraction Gently can do without when he's on the trail of a killer.
If a tiger mauled a man to death, would he bother burying the corpse?
An escaped tiger that terrorizes a little market town is shot dead by a police marksman, having caused nothing more than a minor panic. A year later, a man is found mauled to death and neatly buried in his own back garden. The only thing Gently can be sure of is that the tiger didn't bury the body, so who did?
Good music, fine dining and comfortable surroundings - that's how the Hotel Continental is advertised. Fraud, blackmail, torture and murder - that's what it becomes famous for.
The popular hotel on the English coast built its reputation on its Viennese cuisine and Austrian style but when one of the guests is found dead at the bottom of the nearby cliffs bearing the wounds of a man who has been systematically tortured, Gently brushes aside the hotel's facade of respectability.
International intrigue and a dark secret that stretches from Nazi-occupied Austria across the Atlantic to the back streets of New York leave Gently juggling with a deadly conundrum.
Speed makes the teenage bikers feel alive, but they soon find that murder is the fastest way to die
A five-mile stretch of arrow-straight road outside Latchford acts like a magnet to beatnik bikers using the road like a drag strip. When one of the bikers is killed in an accident, most people regard it as an inevitable consequence of the kids using drugs and racing bikes for kicks. But the evidence points to the young man's death being something more sinister than a mere accident and George Gently is drawn into a world populated by disaffected teenagers, with a jazz soundtrack and a background of murder.
Praise for Alan Hunter's Gently books:
'It is always a pleasure to look forward to another Gently book by Alan Hunter ...' Police Review
A police man-hunt fails to find the husband of a brutally murdered woman - until he turns up in Gently's office.
The hunted man is, in fact, a far-distant relative of Gently and throws himself on the Chief Inspector's mercy. Gently will have none of it and is ready to hand the man over to his colleagues in charge of the investigation, but there are some intriguing elements to the case.
The fact that the prime suspect had fled to be with his mistress and then taken to the open sea in a chartered yacht seems hugely incriminating. But the affluent and exotic lifestyle of the victim, whose apartment was designed for erotic pleasure with her lesbian lover, supports the accused man's protestations of innocence.
There's blood in the heather and a murderer on the loose when Gently pays a quite visit to the Highlands of Scotland.
Had Brenda Merryn not been such a stong-willed woman and had she not been so much in love with George Gently, driving all the way to Scotland for a holiday with Gently's sister and brother-in-law might have been a bit of a challenge. Spying on a heavily armed private army of nationalists, being held at gunpoint on the hillside, being held prisoner in a filthy outhouse and becoming involved in a murder would be unthinkable.
For Gently, it's all in a day's work and his holiday is put on hold while he stalks a murderer in the mountains, with Brenda by his side.
The heat is on when a beautiful young woman is found dead on a beach at the height of summer
Every man in Hiverton knows Rachel Campion. She is the most gorgeous girl to have turned up in the fishing village in living memory. When she is discovered lying dead on the beach, Gently joins the throngs of summer visitors on their annual pilgrimage to the seaside in the midst of a summer heatwave - and as the temperature soars, the mystery deepens.
The long-buried skeleton of a woman is unearthed close to where Rachel's body was found and Gently suddenly has the riddle of two mysterious deaths to solve. Many of the locals, including the secretive brotherhood of fishermen, seem particularly reluctant to help Gently answer the vital questions: Why was Rachel Campion murdered? How is the old skeleton connected with the new crime? And who is the murderer?