Alarums

He always travelled to work under an assumed name, though typically it was one he never changed. In later years, when he retired and it became public knowledge, there came a time when schoolchildren would  dance around concrete playgrounds singing of his fabled false identity and the case which made him, as one newspaper tactlessly put it, ‘hang up his hat’.

Mirella and Howard are floundering. Two careers, two troubled children, a dilapidated colonial house outside Boston. The exploding laundry, the dog getting into the trash again. Then along comes Randi, a dream of a nanny, who cooks, cleans-even makes her own Play-Doh. Not only does she win over the children, the whole neighbourhood approves of her.

The discovery of a dead body shatters the tranquillity of a Cotswold village in Ann Granger’s second Campbell and Carter mystery. When old Monty Bickerstaffe finds a dead body in his drawing room it comes as a nasty surprise – the first of many.