Hungry Death
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
When a blackened body is discovered buried beneath a hot-house, Coroner Titus Cragg uncovers a tale of scandalous secrets stretching back almost twenty years.
"Blake again demonstrates why he belongs in the first rank of historical mystery novelists" - Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Coroner Cragg. You think you can find out what happened at this house? You are mistaken. You can never find out.”
November, 1747. County Coroner Titus Cragg has been called to the scene of a gruesome slaughter at a rural farmhouse: a mother and her four children brutally murdered in their own home. Were they killed by the man who should have protected them: their husband and father? And what role is played by the peculiar religious cult the family belongs to? Perhaps the mute boy who lives in the dog kennel knows the truth.
Meanwhile, Titus’s friend Dr Luke Fidelis is a guest of wealthy landowner and local magistrate John Blackburne at nearby Orford Hall. When a blackened but well-preserved body is discovered deep beneath Blackburne’s hot-house, Cragg and Fidelis are asked to investigate. But how can they make headway when, as they soon learn, this corpse might have been in the ground for centuries?
Gradually, Titus pieces together a tale of secrets, scandal and thwarted passion – and uncovers a shocking connection between the body under the hothouse and the slaughter in the farmhouse.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1747, Blake's superior eighth mystery featuring coroner Titus Cragg and physician Luke Fidelis (after 2021's Secret Mischief) finds Cragg summoned to a gruesome crime scene near Warrington, England. At a farmhouse, Betty Kidd and her four small children have been murdered by someone who used different killing methods—throat-slitting, bludgeoning, and smothering. Betty's missing husband, Billy, is suspected of the crime, possibly motivated by despair over his financial position. Cragg finds Billy's hanged corpse in the Kidds' barn, but he isn't convinced the man died by suicide. There's a witness, an eight-year-old boy, but he's mute and unable to convey what he witnessed. Fidelis happens to be a guest of a nearby landowner, John Blackburne, and uses his forensic skills to assist Cragg. Cragg pursues a suggestion that the Kidds' unusual religion—the rare Eatanswillians sect—may have played a part in the massacre, until the discovery of an apparently centuries-old body on Blackburne's property offers a different possibility. The solution is both fair and satisfying. Blake again demonstrates why he belongs in the first rank of historical mystery novelists.
