The Coffin Tree - Softcover
Book by Butler, Gwendoline
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
From Publishers Weekly:
Gwendoline Butler writes under her own name and the pseudonym Jennie Melville. Educated at Haberdashers, she read history at Oxford, and later married Dr. Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She has one daughter. She is a winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger Award. She was also selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The London Times. She lives in Surrey, England.
The notion of a "Second City" within London, an uneasy alliance of new money and old poverty set in the Docklands area, has proved a singularly effective one for Butler, whose copper John Coffin (last seen in A Coffin for Charley) has steadily risen through the ranks. Here, two of his policemen have died in apparent accidents. Coffin, suspicious, dispatches Phoebe Astley, a onetime paramour, to a clothing boutique suspected of laundering money, as part of an undercover operation. Then a charred body found near a strange tree seems to have belonged to the wife of one of Coffin's dead cops. But little is what it seems to be. Phoebe disappears and an unattached head (one item in a large body and body-part count) is sighted floating in the Thames. The frightened woman in charge of the store and the secretive pensioner who labors on artistic artifacts beneath the eerie tree are just two of the many odd souls who inhabit this brooding tale. Butler has fun teasing us with the identities of the dead, and Coffin's actress wife Stella Pinero, who manages to be both likable and thoroughly theatrical at the same time, adds some levity to these dark proceedings.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherThorndike Pr
- ISBN 10 0786204567
- ISBN 13 9780786204564
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages332
- Rating
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