Fiction

Arthur C. Doyle intended this 1893 collection of stories to be the last of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. The thrilling collection starts off with ‘The Adventure of the Silver Blade’, where Holmes investigates the disappearance of a race horse and a murder. It is followed by ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’, Doyle’s remarkable attempt at infusing sentiment and discrimination issues in the otherwise pragmatic, logic-induced tales of Holmes and Watson. In ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’, an apparent case of burglary links to a murder. Doyle reveals the great trust between Watson and Holmes as the latter depends on his friend’s timely intervention to save him. After similarly exciting stories, Doyle ends the collection by presenting Sherlock’s greatest nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in the shocker, ‘The Final Problem’. Intended as the last case of Sherlock, it depicts fatal consequences as the extraordinary detective strives to defeat the crafty mastermind.

From the moment Lucy met her husband’s mother, she knew she wasn’t the wife Diana had envisioned for her perfect son. Exquisitely polite, friendly, and always generous, Diana nonetheless kept Lucy at arm’s length despite her desperate attempts to win her over. And as a pillar in the community, an advocate for female refugees, and a woman happily married for decades, no one had a bad word to say about Diana…except Lucy.

That was five years ago.

Now, Diana is dead, a suicide note found near her body claiming that she longer wanted to live because of the cancer wreaking havoc inside her body.

But the autopsy finds no cancer.

It does find traces of poison, and evidence of suffocation.

Who could possibly want Diana dead? Why was her will changed at the eleventh hour to disinherit both of her children, and their spouses? And what does it mean that Lucy isn’t exactly sad she’s gone?

The sudden death of a pupil in Fleat House at St Stephen’s – a small English private boarding school in deepest Norfolk – is a shocking event that the headmaster is very keen to call a tragic accident.

But the local police cannot rule out foul play and the case prompts the return of high-flying Detective Inspector Jazmine ‘Jazz’ Hunter to the force. Jazz has her own private reasons for stepping away from her police career in London but reluctantly agrees to front the investigation as a favour to her old boss.

Reunited with her loyal Sergeant, Alastair Miles, she enters the closed world of the school, and as Jazz begins to probe the circumstances surrounding Charlie Cavendish’s tragic death, events are soon to take another troubling turn.

Charlie is exposed as an arrogant bully and those around him had both motive and opportunity to switch the drugs he took daily to control his epilepsy.

As staff at the school close ranks, the disappearance of young pupil Rory Millar and the death of an elderly Classics Master provide Jazz with important leads but are destined to complicate the investigation further. As snow covers the landscape and another suspect goes missing, Jazz must also confront her own personal demons…

Then a particularly grim discovery at the school makes this the most challenging murder investigation of her career. Because Fleat House hides secrets darker than even Jazz could ever have imagined…