The Festival Murder
(2026)(The fourth book in the Carroll and Delaney Mystery series)
A novel by Jackie Sharp
London, summer 1951. The Festival of Britain blazes on the South Bank — and a brilliant scientist lies dead beneath the Dome of Discovery.
The official verdict is heart failure. Dr Holberg's post-mortem says otherwise. And the man who knew Professor Hugh Carver best — Sir Geoffrey Crale, decorated public servant, pillar of the Festival committee — is the last person to have seen him alive.
DCI Robert Delaney has worked enough cases to know when the truth has powerful friends. Two Foreign Office men have just vanished from Southampton, and Whitehall is in no mood for another scandal. MI5 wants the investigation closed. The newspapers want a quiet inquest. Even Scotland Yard's own commissioners would prefer Delaney looked elsewhere.
He cannot. A stranger has brushed past Maggie Carroll in the Festival crowds and pressed something into her bag, mistaking her for someone else — and the mistake has put the woman Delaney is courting in the middle of a network she didn't know existed. Now Maggie is carrying secrets the Crown wants buried and Moscow wants returned, and somewhere among the queues for the Dome of Discovery, a killer is willing to murder again to keep his own past hidden.
The Festival of Britain promised a nation rebuilt. But beneath the Skylon's impossible spire, in the shadow of two diplomats who chose Moscow, an older war is still being fought
For Carroll and Delaney, the halcyon days are running out.
The Festival Murder is the fourth novel in the Carroll & Delaney mystery series. Set against the real history of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the Burgess and Maclean defection, it is a story of murder, espionage, and quiet courage — and of two cautious people deciding, in the middle of everything, to believe in a future of their own.
Perfect for readers of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs, Charles Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge, Rennie Airth's John Madden, and Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope — atmospheric postwar mysteries where murder, memory, and the long shadow of the Second World War meet on rain-washed London streets.
Genre: Historical Mystery
The official verdict is heart failure. Dr Holberg's post-mortem says otherwise. And the man who knew Professor Hugh Carver best — Sir Geoffrey Crale, decorated public servant, pillar of the Festival committee — is the last person to have seen him alive.
DCI Robert Delaney has worked enough cases to know when the truth has powerful friends. Two Foreign Office men have just vanished from Southampton, and Whitehall is in no mood for another scandal. MI5 wants the investigation closed. The newspapers want a quiet inquest. Even Scotland Yard's own commissioners would prefer Delaney looked elsewhere.
He cannot. A stranger has brushed past Maggie Carroll in the Festival crowds and pressed something into her bag, mistaking her for someone else — and the mistake has put the woman Delaney is courting in the middle of a network she didn't know existed. Now Maggie is carrying secrets the Crown wants buried and Moscow wants returned, and somewhere among the queues for the Dome of Discovery, a killer is willing to murder again to keep his own past hidden.
The Festival of Britain promised a nation rebuilt. But beneath the Skylon's impossible spire, in the shadow of two diplomats who chose Moscow, an older war is still being fought
For Carroll and Delaney, the halcyon days are running out.
The Festival Murder is the fourth novel in the Carroll & Delaney mystery series. Set against the real history of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the Burgess and Maclean defection, it is a story of murder, espionage, and quiet courage — and of two cautious people deciding, in the middle of everything, to believe in a future of their own.
Perfect for readers of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs, Charles Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge, Rennie Airth's John Madden, and Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope — atmospheric postwar mysteries where murder, memory, and the long shadow of the Second World War meet on rain-washed London streets.
Genre: Historical Mystery