The Fane and Blackwood Mysteries - Books 1-3
(2026)(A book in the Fane and Blackwood Mystery series)
An omnibus of novels by A G Barnett
He was the finest detective in England. Oxford has spent ten years assuming he died.
Oxford, 1925. Roderick Fane has not left his house on Norham Gardens in a decade. The villa decays around him while its neighbours are kept spotless. He is forty and looks older. Ten years in a wheelchair have pared him down, and a fine white scar runs from temple to jaw, easy to miss until the light catches it.
Nell Blackwood is nineteen. Her father is the Bodley's Librarian, her education came from listening at his dinner table, and she is as sharp as any man at the university. None of it counts for anything. She has no degree, no standing and no future beyond a good marriage. What she does have is a family name that opens every country house in Oxfordshire, and a way of being looked straight past while people talk.
He cannot get out of the house. She can walk into any room in the county and nobody remembers she was there. Between them, they make one detective.
THE STAIRCASE
A professor is found dead at the foot of his own stairs in North Oxford. A steep flight, an old man, a fall in the night. The police call it a tragedy and close the file. Then Nell watches the widow pour the tea, and the widow's hands do not shake at all.
THE ICE HOUSE
A body is locked inside the disused ice house on the Wyndham estate, stabbed with a gardening knife. The only key is on the inside of the door. The shaft above is too narrow for a child, let alone a man. And a stranger claiming to be a Wyndham has just come home after twenty years abroad.
THE PRIEST HOLE
A celebrated surgeon vanishes after a country house party and is found sealed in the priest hole of the rival he argued with. The rival is arrested inside a week. But the more Nell learns about the dead man, the fewer people seem sorry he is gone.
Three full-length 1920s country house mysteries. Locked rooms, hidden rooms, and an Oxford far less civilised than it looks.
Start the series here.
Genre: Mystery
Oxford, 1925. Roderick Fane has not left his house on Norham Gardens in a decade. The villa decays around him while its neighbours are kept spotless. He is forty and looks older. Ten years in a wheelchair have pared him down, and a fine white scar runs from temple to jaw, easy to miss until the light catches it.
Nell Blackwood is nineteen. Her father is the Bodley's Librarian, her education came from listening at his dinner table, and she is as sharp as any man at the university. None of it counts for anything. She has no degree, no standing and no future beyond a good marriage. What she does have is a family name that opens every country house in Oxfordshire, and a way of being looked straight past while people talk.
He cannot get out of the house. She can walk into any room in the county and nobody remembers she was there. Between them, they make one detective.
THE STAIRCASE
A professor is found dead at the foot of his own stairs in North Oxford. A steep flight, an old man, a fall in the night. The police call it a tragedy and close the file. Then Nell watches the widow pour the tea, and the widow's hands do not shake at all.
THE ICE HOUSE
A body is locked inside the disused ice house on the Wyndham estate, stabbed with a gardening knife. The only key is on the inside of the door. The shaft above is too narrow for a child, let alone a man. And a stranger claiming to be a Wyndham has just come home after twenty years abroad.
THE PRIEST HOLE
A celebrated surgeon vanishes after a country house party and is found sealed in the priest hole of the rival he argued with. The rival is arrested inside a week. But the more Nell learns about the dead man, the fewer people seem sorry he is gone.
Three full-length 1920s country house mysteries. Locked rooms, hidden rooms, and an Oxford far less civilised than it looks.
Start the series here.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for A G Barnett's The Fane and Blackwood Mysteries - Books 1-3