A Chief Inspector Woodend novel
4 total works
With the newspapers screaming for a quick solution, this is a case no one wants to touch - so naturally it is Chief Inspector Woodend who finds himself left holding the baby. With his usual panache, Cloggin'-it Charlie quickly immerses himself of the world of television, meeting people he has previously only seen as characters on the screen, learning that while there may be honour among thieves there does not seem to be much on the set of Maddox Row. The question, it soon becomes apparent, is not who wanted to kill Valerie Farnsworth, but who didn't. And will the murderer stop at only one victim? There are those in the know who are convinced that he won't.
A man and a young woman are found blasted away by a rifle in a remote farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors. But where is the farmer, why did he have such swanky furniture in his living room, and who on earth are the victims? Charlie Woodend isn't amused with the people who are getting under his feet as he starts to grapple with these questions, but his steps are abruptly halted when the Deputy Chief Constable decides that, this time, Woodend's high-handedness has gone too far. Woodend may have been suspended but his sense of justice can't let go. And it won't let go however much resistance he encounters and from whom. But as Woodend is depressed to discover, when the people who are determined to keep you down are all-powerful, sheer will-power just isn't enough.
The discovery of the body of a young, red-haired school mistress, lying in a pig-pen with her face half-eaten away, is the beginning of a new investigation for Charlie Woodend. But it is to be an investigation he is soon ordered to abandon when Helen Dunn, the daughter of Wing Commander Dunn - and a pupil at the school where the dead woman taught - suddenly vanishes into thin air. While Woodend and Rutter race against time in the desperate hope of finding the girl alive, Woodend's bagman, Monika Paniatowski, continues to work on the murder, under the supervision of the mysterious Chief Inspector Horrocks, a Scotland Yard man who seems to have only a mild interest in finding the killer. Are the two cases connected? Woodend begins to wonder. And if they are, who is it who seems to be blocking both investigations at every turn?
