Book description
In a copse near a busy Suffolk road, a body has been found neatly
parcelled in plastic. And headless. Detective Chief Inspector Douglas
Quantrill and his team have been working on the case for two months
without a single lead. Sharing Quantrill's office, and replacing cocky
young Martin Tait, is a new detective sergeant, who has shoulder-length
dark hair and a good deal of cool competence. Hilary Lloyd makes
Quantrill feel uncomfortable. Not that he has anything against women
detectives, of course . . . but how can he share with her the easy
camaraderie that team-working should involve? This new constraint at
work combines with the apparently insoluble murder to make Quantrill
unusually gloomy. But a thoroughly nasty little incident cheers him
slightly: someone has left a decapitated cat and a warning sprayed in
blood-red paint on the doorstep of a local house. Might headless cat and
headless corpse be linked? Hilary Lloyd, interviewing the owner of the
cat, finds herself enmeshed in the affairs of the Arrowsmith family -
Ross Arrowsmith, brilliant head of the booming firm, Arrowsmith
Micro-Electronics; Jean Arrowsmith, his likeable wife; Simon Arrowsmith,
his gentle half-brother; elderly Nellie, his stepmother. And brassy
Angela, wife of Simon, owner of the cat, and recipient of the gruesome
warning . . . There seems, after all, to be no connection between cat
and corpse, and to Quantrill's annoyance Martin Tait breezes in, sent by
the regional crime squad to help in the investigation. But by then the
Arrowsmith family affairs have become more rancorous, and Quantrill and
Hilary have another murder on their hands. This is the fourth in Sheila
Radley's highly successful series involving Chief Inspector Quantrill,
his family and colleagues, and the fictional town of Breckham Market.
She has a novelist's eye for character and motive as well as landscape,
and this story of overpowering love and fury is set against the calm
September beauty of the Suffolk countryside. 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.
