The town of Bath has taken on a new melody: murder
The elegant but sedate city of Bath might not be an obvious place for an international musician to settle down, but Sara Selkirk finds herself drawn back to the town. It doesn’t hurt that the dreamy DCI Andrew Poole, Sara’s friend and only pupil, lives there. In this, the second of Morag Joss’s Sara Selkirk Mysteries, Joss’s Bath is once again the city that readers want to get lost in.
Sara’s attraction to Andrew leads her to do something a musician of her caliber would never normally do: She joins him in the Circus Opera Group, Bath’s community opera society. This isn’t Covent Garden. The interpersonal politics of aging divas, two vain composers, and an overeager protégée are plenty for Sara to deal with—murder, on the other hand, is something else entirely. As the investigation preoccupying Andrew hits closer to home for Sara, it is up to her to find the pattern in the killings before it’s too late.
Morag Joss’s writing career began in 1996 when her first short story won an award in a national competition. Starting to write, she says, meant “discovering a lifelong ambition I didn’t know I had.” Joss’s first three novels comprise the Sara Selkirk Mysteries, the first of which, Funeral Music, was a finalist for the Dilys Award. Half Broken Things won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger Award and was later adapted into a TV film starring Penelope Wilton, and The Night Following was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Some critics describe Joss’s work as psychological suspense and others as literary fiction. She received a PhD from Oxford Brookes University in 2014 and is now at work on her ninth novel, Good to Go.