Leo Carr has spent fifteen years covering London's worst. Stabbings in Southwark, corruption at City Hall, bodies pulled from the Thames before the morning commute. When the paper grants him a six-month sabbatical, he retreats to the Cotswolds village where he grew up, intending to write a memoir, do nothing particularly strenuous, and let the city noise leave him alone for a while.
What he finds instead is a letter published in the local Parish Circular. Written by elderly antiquarian Arthur Huxley with meticulous courtesy, it asks one careful, devastating question: why has no one ever properly examined the death of Thomas Pell on Garland Night, 1989?
Three days after the bonfire festival, Arthur Huxley is dead. The coroner says heart failure. Leo says the timing is wrong.
With a reporter's eye sharpened by years of metropolitan crime and a local's intuition for the village's hidden social architecture, Leo begins pulling at the threads that Wicken Magna has been weaving tight for thirty-seven years. He finds a community of kind, evasive, increasingly anxious people — all of them carrying something about a night when the bonfires burned and a young man fell from a height that should not have killed him.
Atmospheric, unhurried, and acutely observed, Dead Letters is a cozy mystery that trusts its readers to care as much about the community as the crime. For anyone who has ever suspected that the most dangerous secrets are the ones buried in plain sight.
Genre: Mystery
What he finds instead is a letter published in the local Parish Circular. Written by elderly antiquarian Arthur Huxley with meticulous courtesy, it asks one careful, devastating question: why has no one ever properly examined the death of Thomas Pell on Garland Night, 1989?
Three days after the bonfire festival, Arthur Huxley is dead. The coroner says heart failure. Leo says the timing is wrong.
With a reporter's eye sharpened by years of metropolitan crime and a local's intuition for the village's hidden social architecture, Leo begins pulling at the threads that Wicken Magna has been weaving tight for thirty-seven years. He finds a community of kind, evasive, increasingly anxious people — all of them carrying something about a night when the bonfires burned and a young man fell from a height that should not have killed him.
Atmospheric, unhurried, and acutely observed, Dead Letters is a cozy mystery that trusts its readers to care as much about the community as the crime. For anyone who has ever suspected that the most dangerous secrets are the ones buried in plain sight.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for J A Clarke's Dead Letters