Book description
Chief Inspector Quantrill was a very sensible policeman. But
Shakespeare was not on his beat and he was not sure who Ophelia was. His
ignorance embarrassed him when Mary Gedge, the most brilliant young girl
in Ashthorpe, was found dead in the river, apparently drowned in shallow
water while gathering flowers on May Day morning. Others were quick to
see the resemblance, among them Mrs Bloomfield, head of the school where
Mary had been a pupil before gaining admission-one of the first girls to
do so-to King's College, Cambridge. Ophelia was a beautiful innocent who
fell in love with the wrong man and positively invited him to humiliate
and destroy her. But was this true of Mary? And if so, which of her
several admirers had caused the tragedy? Quantrill knows the people of
Ashthorpe and of Breckham Market-the East Anglian district where he
works-almost too well. We, too, get to know the locality as his
investigation proceeds and Sheila Radley brings her characters vividly
to life. Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural
Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose
further education was free. She went from her village school via high
school to London University, where she read history. She served for nine
years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then
worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil
servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional
work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post
office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first
books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then
took to crime, and wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.
