Book description
Battered to death with a piece of abstract sculpture titled
'Reconciliation,' Whitehall departmental head Sir Nicholas Clark is
claimed by his colleagues to have been a fine and respected public
servant cut off in his prime. Bewildered by the labyrinthine bureaucracy
of Whitehall, Scotland Yard's Super-intendent Jim Milton recognizes a
potential ally in Clark's young Private Secretary, Robert Amiss. Milton
soon learns from Amiss how Whitehall works: that it can be Machiavellian
and potentially homicidal, that Sir Nicholas was obnoxious and widely
loathed, that he had spent the weeks before his murder upsetting and
antagonizing family and associates, and that his last morning on earth
had been spent gleefully observing the success of his plan to embarrass
his minister and his department publicly. And they still need to
discover who wielded the blunt instrument. This is the first of Ruth
Dudley Edwards' witty, iconoclastic but warm-hearted satires about the
British Establishment. A pleasantly talky, old-fashioned whodunit -
with informative satire of politician-vs-civil-servant tangles in
Whitehall bureaucracy. Dr Ruth Dudley Edwards was born and brought up
in Dublin, Ireland. Since she graduated she has lived in England, where
she has been a teacher, a Cambridge postgraduate student, a marketing
executive, a civil servant and, finally, a freelance writer, journalist
and broadcaster. An historian and prize-winning biographer, her recent
non-fiction includes the authorized history of The Economist, a portrait
of the British Foreign Office and a book about the newspaper world of
the mid-twentieth century. She uses her knowledge of the British
establishment in her satirical crime novels: targets so far include the
civil service, gentlemen's clubs, Cambridge colleges, the House of
Lords, the Church of England, publishing, literary prizes and - always -
political correctness. She has three times been short-listed for awards
from the Crime Writers' Association. www. ruthdudleyedwards. com
