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CATHERINE AIRD (Kinn Hamilton McIntosh)
Books by Catherine Aird:
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(1971) Dangerous moonlight illuminated the English skies the night a German bomb razed the houses in Lamb Lane, Berebury. Then three decades quietly passed before a careless workman's pickaxe struck an old skeleton buried under the wreckage ... and exhumed a new case of murder for Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan. Time had blacked out the clues. All that remained were a body ... an unborn baby ... and a bullet. Could the Inspector's uncanny investigative instincts now unearth a killer? Or would this delayed action affair explode and send another victim to moulder in the grave? |
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(1967) When Thomas Harding retired to the Manor House of Easterbrook, he soon discovered it contained rather more than the house-agents had advertised. Behind the Tudor oak paneling of the drawing room lay a well-hidden priest's hole ... and the remains of a 200-year-old murder. But there was more than one skeleton in the Easterbrook parish cupboard. The entire village seemed to share a guilty secret about the ancient Barbary family who once owned the mansion ... and about the very recent killing of a beautiful Calleford blonde. |
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(1984) The finger dropped by a common crow on a woodsy English footpath was most uncommonly missing a body. But a single digit was enough to tell Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan that something was rotten in the county of Calleshire ... something besides the dead man who lay unburied somewhere among the dewy green fields of British farmland. So while search teams scoured the area for the corpus delicti, Sloan went looking for evidence of murder in a county village's most fertile ground - at the local pub. There the slips betwixt cup and lip might provide clues to finding both corpse and killer in Inspector Sloan's most challenging case. |
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(1968) The townspeople would have said Larking,
with its stone rectory and thatched farmhouses, was typical
of a thousand other English villages. As it happened, this
was true. And everyone in Larking thought they knew
everything about everyone else. In that they found they were
mistaken ... especially the morning the postman found Grace
Jenkins murdered. She had lived quietly in Boundary Cottage
for twenty-one years, but there was a great deal about Grace
the townspaople didn't know. And Detective Inspector C.D.
Sloan soon discovered they knew even less about her
daughter, Henrietta ... in fact, nobody could explain who
Henrietta really was.
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(1969) At 11:30 P.M. in the old Saxon church tower at Randall's Bridge, a huge statue toppled and smashed. Heavy blocks of broken marble now lay up against the doors, barring any exit. The solitary wondow was too narrow for a man to pass through; the belfry high above led only to the steep roof which rose beyond reach of any ladder. When Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan put his shoulder to one tower door, it barely opened. Through the crack he could clearly see the room was empty - except for the bells, the debris of shattered marble ... and the protrudung arm of a dead man. How did the murderer escape this sealed tower? Sloan's only clues; a spent match, an emerald earring, and a black thread. |
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(1982) "Found drowned, my foot," said the pathologist two minutes after looking at the body. The unidentified young man pulled from the salt water near the fishing village of Edsway hadn't drowned after all. And he hadn't been a bather, either, observed Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan. One simply didn't go swimming in a shirt and trousers. Not voluntarily, that is. And then there was the matter of the mysterious copper weight stuffed in the dead man's pocket ... and the sunken ship discovered offshore. It all added up to murder as Inspector Sloan set out in a dinghy to net the killer before he got the chance to send another victim to a watery grave. |
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(1977) The college dons at the University of Calleshire fully expected trouble when the students planned to shake their ivory tower with a sit-in at Almstone Hall. But no one expected the very peculiar theft from a dormitory room ... or the very dead body in the college quadrangle. For Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, the ivied halls hid a host of clues - from the words whispered with the dying man's parting breath to what a madrigal singer saw. So it was only a matter of time until he uncovered the murderer hidden in the groves of academe ... but could he do it before death became another victim's alma mater? |
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(1980) Two terrible injustices occurred at the annual Horticultural Society Flower Show in the village of Almstone; Ken Walls' splendid tomatoes were overlooked in the competition and Nurse Cooper was murdered. Her body lay under a tarpaulin behind the fortuneteller's tent, which, along with the rest of the exhibitions, had been pitched on the venerable grounds of the Priory Estate. For Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, it was simply a question of who benefited from the nurse's demise. But his only clues were the suspicious appearance of an heiress, a reel of green wire, and an empty cup of tea. |
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(1966) "Sister Anne," said the Mother Superior
unperturbed, "died on Wednesday evening some time after
supper, probably in the corridor leading from the Great Hall
to the kitchens. Her body was put into the broom cupboard
and later thrown down the cellar steps." Who would want to
kill a cloistered nun? But, astonishingly, someone had. It
was as much of a surprise to the sisters of the Convent of
St. Anselm as it was to Inspector C.D. Sloan, Criminal
Investigations Department. But now it was up to the
Inspector to find the motive and the murderer.
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(1975) Twelve people sat down for dinner at Strontfield Park, William Fenton's ancestral home. Thirteen would have been most unlucky. For the host, however, the evening could not have been unluckier. By midnight he was dead - killed instantly when his motorcar smashed into another on a bad bit of road. The problem for Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan was the autopsy. The victim, it seemed, was about to die in any event. Along with the cold cucumber soup, crown of lamb, raspberry cremets, and a fine aged port, someone served the lord of the manor a dose of deadly poison. But which of the surviving eleven had the opportunity ... and who had the motive to want him dead? |
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(1979) On the pathologist's cold metal table lay the naked body of Beatrice Gwendoline Wansdyke, spinster ... Dead of perfectly natural causes at age 59. "The problem," mused the good doctor, "is not so much what she died from as what she died with: a quarter of a million pounds, in a bank account no maiden lady of modest means should have." Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan could feel in his bones it was murder. He had guessed at the motive. He would surely uncover the method. But why couldn't he find out where-oh-where had her little dog gone? And why would looking almost cost him his life? |
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(1973) On Sunday the public paid half a crown to view Ornum House's three hundred rooms, its exceptional display of fine china, its authentic Holbein, its dank dungeon complete with suits of armor ... and a dead body. With Burke's Peerage tucked under one arm and a dictionary under the other, Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan tiptoes through the halls of the aristocracy. His impecable powers of observation might reveal who murdered the family archivist, but the family ghost walks through these same corridors. So someone else is going to die. |
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