Description

A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY
Rediscover Gladys Mitchell – one of the ‘Big Three’ female crime fiction writers alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Alastair Bing’s guests gather around his dining table at Chaynings, a charming country manor. But one seat, belonging to the legendary explorer Everard Mountjoy, remains empty. When the other guests search the house, a body is discovered in a bath, drowned. The body is that of a woman, but could the corpse in fact be Mountjoy? A peculiar and sinister sequence of events has only just begun…

This is Gladys Mitchell’s first book and it marks the entrance of the inimitable Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, psychoanalyst and unorthodox amateur sleuth, into the world of detective fiction. But instead of leading the police to the murderer, she begins as their chief suspect.

Publisher Review

"She is one of the Big Three women detective writers" * Observer * "Begins like a parody of a country house murder. But you soon see that the author means the jokes, and also develops both a tricky mystery and a quite solid argument about crime and its disruption of society. Then she brings it all to a head in a very remarkable conclusion. From the start, Mitchell was outstanding." * Glasgow Herald * "A crime writer who, in her day, ranked with Christie and Sayers" * Daily Mail * "Extremely well constructed story of murder and detection...Mrs Bradley is the prize piece" * Daily News * "Gladys Mitchell can always be relied upon for a packed and meaty novel, and an intelligent one at that" * Guardian *