The Lively Dead: A Crime Novel

By Peter Dickinson

Book Overview

In this mystery from CWA Gold Dagger winner Peter Dickinson, a landlady discovers a corpse beneath her crowded London boardinghouse

A sturdy young woman with a knack for home repair and a practical sense of Marxism, Lydia is renovating her London townhouse while her husband finishes law school. To bring in extra money, she rents her upper floors to the exiled government of Livonia, a Baltic state that was long ago absorbed into the Soviet Union.

One day, as Lydia is taking up the floorboards, the Livonians carry a coffin through the house. It bears their housekeeper, who is to be honored with vodka toasts and a solemn funeral. After the ceremony, Lydia returns to her floorboards. Beneath the rotted wood is dirt--and in the dirt, she discovers a corpse that never reached the graveyard.

Identifying the body and finding the person who stashed it there draws Lydia into a tangle of spies and counterspies as her quiet little boardinghouse becomes a new front in the global Cold War.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1497697662
• ISBN13: 9781497697669
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

70s Peter Dickinson

I love Peter Dickinson novels. He writes extremely well, sort of extremely good in a very subtle way, & you keep wanting to read more of him. This is a really nice one about a semi-Marxist landlord/housewife/carpenter with a pre-school age child, and a Baltic government-in-exile renting out the top floor of her house. One of her other tenants keels over and dies, a hot dude comes to work for the government, everybody follows each other, & the main character and her husband (who is recovering from depression/a nervous breakdown) have lovely cozy moments. I wish I had a nice relationship like that with someone. By the way, there is another review of this book, by lazy reviewer, misfiled on the page for the book Walking Dead, also by Peter Dickinson.