Book description
Lill Hodsden was a monster. She rode roughshod over her daughter, wiped
her feet on her husband, blackmailed her lovers and smothered her sons
with a mother love that left them screaming out for freedom. Lill set
the hackles rising all over Todmarsh, the little South Coast town she
queened it over. She was just asking to be done in. And her sons were
very ready to oblige. In fact, they had it all worked out, for Saturday
night. But when Lill was found garrotted on Thursday, on the way home
from one of her boy-friends', the case was wide open, and half Todmarsh
would have regarded the murderer as a civic benefactor. Inspector
McHale, on his first murder case, is a man who values intelligence,
particularly his own. He is convinced he is going to discover the
killer. But is he going to discover the right one? In the claustrophobic
relationships around the appalling Lill, Robert Barnard has used his
gift for creating murderable monsters to set up a murder everybody can
sympathize with. Robert Barnard is a well-established crime writer. He
has won the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award as well as the Anthony, Agatha
and Macavity Awards, has been nominated eight times for the Edgar Award
and was the winner of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger Award in 2003 for a
lifetime of achievement. He has also written crime novels under the
pseudonym of Bernard Bastable. He lives with his wife in Leeds and has
had over 45 titles published in the UK and US.
