Smoke Without Fire

Andrew Basnett does not have very good luck with Christmas. Most recently, visiting friends in Australia for the festive season, he wound up with a front-row seat to some rather extraordinary family strife. And this time around, his plans for a peaceful, English-village holiday get blown up when…well, when his hosts’ neighbor, Sir Lucas Dearden, gets blown up. A bomb, you know. This is England, it’s the 1980s: everyone shudders, blames the IRA, and moves on. Except, of course, for Andrew Basnett. Who knew, he wonders, about Sir Lucas’s last-minute change of plans? Why had Sir Lucas meticulously removed one page of the (rather stunningly dull) memoir he was writing? And could the bomb possibly have been intended for someone else?