The Naked Nuns

What strange passions seethe beneath the prosperous surface of Flaxborough town? Affable but diligent Detective Inspector Purbright is tasked with uncovering the darker underbelly of greed, corruption and crime. A classic British series of police mysteries, laced with wry humour.
Watson has an unforgivably sharp eye for the ridiculous. - New York Times
Flaxborough is Colin Watson’s quiet English town whose outward respectability masks a seething pottage of greed, crime and vice … Mr Watson wields a delightfully witty pen dripped in acid. - Daily Telegraph Flaxborough has its share of fat-cat businessmen - wheels’ (in US gangster parlance) … Like the brash Councillor Henry Crispin and snobbish Arnold Hatch, proprietor of the Floradora Country Club. Their bitter rivalry is well known, so when Crispin’s luxury river cruiser, the Lively Lady, is ruthlessly sunk, shortly after Hatch’s night-time shenanigans had been lit up for the world to see, no one expects the feud to die away peacefully. But there is a death, a far from peaceful one, and DI Purbright and Sergeant Love have information that it might be linked with the arrival in town of a certain Sicilian-American gentleman. Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson’s tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay. AUTHOR: Colin Watson was born in 1920 in Croydon in south London. At age 17 he was appointed cub reporter on the Boston Guardian, a regional newspaper. His years as a journalist in the Lincolnshire market town proved formative, and he collected there much of the material that provided the basis for the Flaxborough novels. He won two CWA Silver Dagger awards, and the Flaxborough series was adapted for television by the BBC under the title Murder Most English. Watson died in 1983.