The Last Bell: Thoroughly Inconvenient Deaths
The last time the bell at St Bartholomew's rings, someone doesn't live to hear it.
Barton Sutton's old primary school closes for good this year, the playground gone to bindweed, the honours board about to come down for the last time, and eighty former pupils have gathered for one final Founders and Formers Supper before the flats move in. Lady Harriet Pembrook expects paper chains, over-competitive vol-au-vents, and her husband Gerald losing his spectacles at least once before pudding.
She does not expect Douglas Tremayne, the evening's guest of honour and the village's least mourned old boy, to be found in the locked storeroom with the ceremonial handbell lying beside him, considerably the worse for wear.
Nearly everyone in the hall had a reason to want Douglas dead. A classmate with a thirty-year grudge. A headmistress watching her life's work sold out from under her. A nephew who owes rather more than he's admitted to. Detective Inspector Malcolm Reach has no shortage of suspects and precisely one problem: none of the obvious ones actually fit.
Harriet keeps a notebook. She accumulates observations. She does not guess.
She concludes.
What she finds, the deeper she looks, is a village with a very long memory and a very poor conscience, a secret thirty-two years old, quietly paid for every month since and never once properly owned, and a silence Barton Sutton has been keeping so comfortably for so long that nobody thought to ask who was still paying the price for it.
The Last Bell is another book in the Thoroughly Inconvenient Deaths series, cosy mysteries set in the English countryside, where the villages are charming, the history runs deep, and the body count is, frankly, unreasonable.
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