The Calleshire Chronicles Volume Two

Book excerpt: A set of intriguing British whodunits featuring Detective Inspector Sloan—from a CWA Diamond Dagger winner and “most ingenious” author (The New Yorker). Over the course of twenty-four crime novels set in the fictional County of Calleshire, England, and featuring the sleuthing team of shrewd Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and his less-than-shrewd sidekick, Detective Constable William Crosby, award-winning author Catherine Aird maintained the perfect balance between cozy village mystery and police procedural. These three entertaining crime novels offer “the very best in British mystery” (The New Yorker). A Late Phoenix: In the quaint Victorian town of Berebury, England, a skeleton has been found in the crater of a World War II bomb site. But this corpse is no buried casualty of the Blitz. The cause of death, Detective Inspector Sloan discovers, is a bullet to the spine. His Burial Too: Detective Inspector Sloan puzzles over an industrialist crushed under the rubble of an old Saxon church tower. With no eyewitnesses and little evidence, the policeman doesn’t seem to have a prayer of solving the case. And then a second body turns up. Slight Mourning: Twelve friends sit down for supper at Strontfield Park—but only eleven survive the evening. After dinner, the host offers to drive one of his guests home, only to die in a violent accident. His autopsy shows that he ingested enough barbiturates to kill a horse, and now the guest list is Sloan’s roster of suspects.