A set of intriguing British whodunits featuring Detective Inspector Sloan—from a CWA Diamond Dagger winner and “most ingenious” author (The New Yorker).
Over the course of twenty-four crime novels set in the fictional County of Calleshire, England, and featuring the sleuthing team of shrewd Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and his less-than-shrewd sidekick, Detective Constable William Crosby, award-winning author Catherine Aird maintained the perfect balance between cozy village mystery and police procedural. These three entertaining crime novels offer “the very best in British mystery” (The New Yorker).
A Late Phoenix: In the quaint Victorian town of Berebury, England, a skeleton has been found in the crater of a World War II bomb site. But this corpse is no buried casualty of the Blitz. The cause of death, Detective Inspector Sloan discovers, is a bullet to the spine.
His Burial Too: Detective Inspector Sloan puzzles over an industrialist crushed under the rubble of an old Saxon church tower. With no eyewitnesses and little evidence, the policeman doesn’t seem to have a prayer of solving the case. And then a second body turns up.
Slight Mourning: Twelve friends sit down for supper at Strontfield Park—but only eleven survive the evening. After dinner, the host offers to drive one of his guests home, only to die in a violent accident. His autopsy shows that he ingested enough barbiturates to kill a horse, and now the guest list is Sloan’s roster of suspects.
Catherine Aird is the author of more than twenty volumes of detective mysteries and three collections of short stories. Most of her fiction features Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and Detective Constable W. E. Crosby. Aird holds an honorary master’s degree from the University of Kent and was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the Girl Guide Association. She lives in a village in East Kent, England.