Book description
A clergyman should be above reproach, an example to his flock. But what
is Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill to make of the Reverend
Robin Ainger, Rector of St Botolph's in the quiet Suffolk town of
Breckham Market, when the good-looking, popular parson lies to the
police? With the thawing of prolonged winter snow, the skeleton of a
recently dead man has been found in a meadow belonging to the Rectory.
Whose is the body, and how did it come there? Both Ainger and his wife
Gillian are taut with suppressed hysteria at the discovery. As Quantrill
- in the face of carefully framed denials from the Rectory, but with
hints that Mrs Ainger's elderly father knows more than he's telling -
struggles to piece together clues centering on the presence of two
Australians, an uncouth backpacker and a clever girl with beautiful
flame-red hair, he begins to guess at the depth of suffering hidden
beneath the conventional routine of Rectory life. Sheila Radley has a
novelist's eye for character and motive, as well as a crime writer's
talent for deception and mystery. The result is a tense, beautifully
crafted and satisfying story with an entirely unexpected dénouement - a
worthy successor to her previous book, The Chief Inspector's Daughter
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.
