A Fete Worse Than Death - Hardcover

Gordon-Smith, Dolores

3.95

628 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786719850 ISBN 13: 9780786719853

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2007

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It's 1922 and Jack Haldean, young ex-war pilot and detective story writer is enjoying a village fete in the grounds of a Sussex country house. It seems an idyll of England - then comes the first murder.

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From the Author:

I've always loved the Golden Age classic crime, with smokey old London, a country house and the "guilty villages" of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. I wanted to write a book that (in my own mind at least!) captured some of that charm, character, pace and sheer enjoyment. I wanted, as well, to ground the events firmly and historically "After the War" . The First World War shattered all the old certainties; nothing was ever the same again. I visited the French and Belgian battlefields and discovered the miles of tunnels that lie beneath the chalk of the Somme - and the story of "Fete" started to come together. There was a secret in those tunnels... a secret that had been buried for years. I had my story.

From the Inside Flap:

It's 1922 and Jack Haldean, young writer and former Royal Flying Corps pilot is enjoying the local village fete on a beautiful summer's day in the heart of Sussex. This village life sums up the idyllic pre-war England he dreamed of during the war. The idyll is shattered when Jack's fellow officer, Jeremy Boscombe, is found dead in the fortune-teller's tent. Jack realizes that the roots of the crime go back to the Battle of the Somme, when a party of British soldiers were betrayed, ambushed and killed in the network of tunnels under the Augier Ridge. The trail leads inexorably back to the Somme and it is those silent tunnels that Jack faces his final enemy - one who must kill to survive.

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