Listed Dead (Bunch Courtney Investigates, Book 3) by Jan Edwards
Release date: August 6, 2020
Subgenre: Historical mystery, WWII mystery
About Listed Dead:
November 1940. The Battle of Britain has only just ended and the horror of the Blitz is reaching its height.
Two deaths in rapid succession on the Sussex Downs brings Bunch Courtney and Chief Inspector Wright together once more. What could possibly link a fatal auto accident with the corpse in a derelict shepherd's hut? The only clue the pair have is a handwritten list of the members of a supper club that meets at London's Café de Paris. Two of those on that list are now dead and the race is on to solve the mystery before any more end up on the mortuary slab.
Excerpt:
The skies were just losing the pinks
of dawn in favour of a wintery blue, and a crisp November frost had turned the
ground to iron beneath Perry’s hooves. It meant she was obliged to keep her
fell pony to a slow trot, but the air was sweet and the hillsides quiet. Not a
whisper of the fighter craft from Tangmere and Parham that had been fending off
the Luftwaffe on a seemingly daily basis. She revelled in the peace of that
scant twenty-minutes ride before she was reining Perry in near the coppice
overlooking Lych Hill.
She slapped the pony’s neck and crooning softly for him to
‘steady up, Perry, steady,’ stood in the stirrups to view the accident site
from a discreet distance.
An ambulance shared a stretch of icy verge with a police
Wolseley. Doctor Lewis’s old Type E Vauxhall was pulled into the entrance to
Chells Farm where the road dived between the trees toward Inchett village, and
between them, just where the bend was sharpest, the rear end of a wrecked
sports car protruded from the ditch at a giddy angle – its spare wheel pointing
eye-like at the sky while its red bonnet was buried deep in glutinous Sussex
mud. Bunch knew a Jaguar Roadster when she saw one. That, she told
herself, is about as far from being an Austin Ruby as it’s possible to get. And it’s not Parsons, thank God.
It was a little before eight o’clock but a small handful of
locals had already gathered on the opposite side of the lane. Bunch always
marvelled at how newsworthy events never failed to draw an audience at any
given time or place. In a place like Wyncombe, she thought, just
about everything is grist for the gossips’ mill. Strange that Tilly Parrish
isn’t out here to see what was going on in her driveway. Doubtless she’d view gawking
as common and vulgar.
She gave Perry another pat and settled back in the saddle.
‘The Honourable Rose “Bunch” Courtney, on the other hand,’ she told her pony,
‘has no such qualms. If there’s something going on this close to Perringham I
want to know about it.’
PC Botting and the ageing Doctor Lewis were Wyncombe
residents and not unexpected. The ambulance crew were quite naturally strangers
to her. Detective Chief
Inspector William Wright, however, was a curiosity. What on earth are you doing here? she thought. You’re rather too senior to be investigating an auto crash. Something’s
brewing.
Wright
stood hunched against the chill, making him seem even leaner than she
remembered. The brim of his trademark fedora was pulled down against the cold
air, and his town shoes were wholly inadequate against the crackles of icy tyre
tracks around his feet.
She
urged Perry out onto the road, his hooves ringing loud on the metalled surface,
and halted just a few yards from them. Wright glanced briefly in her direction
and then looked back to his bag man, DS Ernie Carter, without so much as a nod
of recognition.
‘Damn
you,’ Bunch muttered. ‘Are we really going to go through all this territorial
nonsense again?’ She slid from the saddle and hitched Perry to the field gate.
‘Good morning, Chief Inspector Wright. What brings you here?’
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About Jan Edwards:
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