A young woman’s murder leads a British detective deep into the shadows of a wealthy family’s secret past—where a killer lies in wait.
It would be the height of British understatement to say that retired surgeon Charles Bromley and his step-daughter Antonia Halliday do not have the rosiest of relationships. After all, Antonia did accuse him of intentionally botching her father’s surgery so that he could marry her rich, widowed mother. Now Antonia has been found murdered on the grounds of Bromley Manor, and Charles isn’t exactly stricken with grief. He’s plenty upset, however, by the disruptions caused by DCI Neil Paget and his team as they investigate the crime.
While Bromley complains to Paget’s superiors, Paget forges on with the investigation, doggedly uncovering a nest of nasty family secrets. Though he is warned to tread lightly, nothing will stop him from getting to the bottom of this perplexing case before the killer decides to tie up loose ends.
Frank Smith was born in Canada and went to England at the age of six. At the age of 16 he went to work in Bletchley Park, the wartime station where enemy communications were being decoded with the aid of the famous Enigma machine. He began writing in the 1960s. The theme of the first five books, beginning with CORPSE IN HANDCUFFS, was espionage in the Cold War years, but when that came to an end he moved on to police procedurals featuring DCI Neil Paget and DS John Tregalles.