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 In Flaxborough’s posh neighbouring village, Mumblesbury, the local solicitor, Richard Daspard Loughbury, has suddenly died.
Natural causes it appears, but DI Purbright and the ever-helpful Miss Lucy Teatime are taken aback by the quality of Loughbury’s art collection
including a Paul Klee, a Corot, and even a fragment of the True Cross . All seem to have been acquired locally and the question of blackmail hangs in the air. Loughbury’s decidedly un-posh widow, Zoe, is less than grief-stricken, as are a cast of colourful characters from randy farmers to gin-soaked county types. Then, the recent suicide of a local farmer’s wife also begins to look questionable. Witty and a little wicked, this final tale in Colin Watson’s Flaxborough series offers 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.
