Book description
In the hottest summer for half a century, someone kidnaps Beryl
Websdell's garden gnome, leaving a ransom note demanding half a pound of
jelly babies for its return. Beryl is upset, and so are her neighbours
in the rural Suffolk village where she lives, because the gnome
disappeared three days after her daughter also went missing. Beryl
doesn't think her daughter has been kidnapped . . . not really . . . but
she is worried. And so are the police. Inspector Martin Tait is
holidaying in the neighbourhood at the time, visiting his elderly Aunt
Con form whom he hopes one day to inherit a lot of money. That, when it
happens, will suit his plans to become a very young and very wealthy
Chief Constable . . . and perhaps to marry Alison, pretty daughter of
Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill, his ex-boss? But two things happen
to jolt Martin Tait out of his pleasant holiday day-dreams: he finds a
body in an empty cottage of his Aunt's; and Aunt Con later confronts him
with some shattering information. . . This is the fifth in Sheila
Radley's highly successful series of crime novels featuring Douglas
Quantrill, his family and colleagues, and set in the Suffolk
countryside. She has a novelist's eye for character and motive, as well
as landscape, and she waves the strands of the story - love, yearning,
terror, grief, bitterness and suspicion - into a subtle, engrossing, and
satisfying whole. 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.
