Book description
Clanger Bell, Breckham Market's well-known drunk, is run over and
killed as he staggers across the street at closing time. It seems to
everyone - to town residents, the police, and to Clanger's only
relative, his sister Miss Eunice Bell - that his death was an accident,
brought upon himself by his drunken folly. Certainly no one blames the
unfortunate driver, a newly rich and newly married man called Jack
Goodrum who has recently bought a large house in the town. So when Miss
Bell changes her mind, and calls in Detective Chief Inspector Douglas
Quantrill and his attractive Sergeant, Hilary Lloyd, to announce that
she is convinced that the 'accident' was in fact murder, the two
detectives are reluctant to take her seriously. Subsequent events,
however, prove serious indeed. A nasty robbery and a brutal killing send
Quantrill and Hilary probing the lives of local people, and uncovering
disturbing depths of hatred and bitterness. Quantrill's own private life
at this time is also full of disturbing emotions: resentment of ageing,
secret yearning for Hilary, anger with his rebellious teenage son . . .
Sheila Radley has a novelist's fascination with character and motive, as
well as an acute eye for landscape, and this is the sixth novel in her
highly successful, and superbly well written, series featuring Douglas
Quantrill, his family and his colleagues on the Breckham Market police
force. Private conflicts, old grievances, tragic accidents and
misdirected love - these explosive ingredients combine in Sheila
Radley's powerful story to shatter the life and happiness of more than
one family in the peaceful Suffolk market town. 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.
