Keyhole Crime S.
3 total works
Lill Hodsden was a monster. She rode roughshod over her daughter, wiped her feet on her husband, blackmailed her lovers and smothered her sons with a mother love that left them screaming out for freedom. Lill set the hackles rising all over Todmarsh, the little South Coast town she queened it over. She was just asking to be done in.
And her sons were very ready to oblige. In fact, they had it all worked out, for Saturday night. But when Lill was found garrotted on Thursday, on the way home from one of her boy-friends', the case was wide open, and half Todmarsh would have regarded the murderer as a civic benefactor. Inspector McHale, on his first murder case, is a man who values intelligence, particularly his own. He is convinced he is going to discover the killer. But is he going to discover the right one?
In the claustrophobic relationships around the appalling Lill, Robert Barnard has used his gift for creating murderable monsters to set up a murder everybody can sympathize with.
It was midday on December 21st in the Norwegian city of Tromsø when the boy was last seen – a tall, blond boy swathed in an anorak and scarf against the Arctic noon. He was not seen again, not until three months later, when Professor Mackenzie’s dog started sniffing around in the snow and uncovered a human ear . . . attached to a naked corpse.
Nobody knew who he was, or where he had come from. And after three months it was almost impossible to track down the identity of the corpse. But Inspector Fagermo refused to give up – and as he probed deeper into the Arctic city he began to discover a dangerous conspiracy of blackmail, espionage, and cold-blooded murder.
Regarded as Robert Barnard's best, Death in a Cold Climate is a scandi detective novel with a captivating mystery at its heart.
There were two Mrs Machins, relicts of the talented working-class writer Walter Machin, who was just about to be immortalised by the literary establishment. Viola was large, overbearing and, even in her seventies, still voluptuous. Hilda, the first (and divorced) Mrs Machin, was perky, sharp and the guardian of the deceased Walter’s literary papers. For ten years the two ‘widows’ had lived together in the same house, not speaking to each other, but jealously guarding his memory and literary reputation.
But before the Machin legend could really take off, there was a fire – and a murder. One of the Mrs Machins was silenced for good, and slowly, from the past, emerged a fascinating and intriguing assortment of characters. Somewhere, in their memories of Walter Machin, lay the catastrophic secret that had led to murder.
‘A literary whodunit – with an unusual ending’ London Mystery Selection
‘Freshly written with lots of sly fun’ Guardian
‘Finely crafted and intriguing’ Booklist
‘A witty, well-written and intriguing story’ Times Literary Supplement