A Shot in the Dark
A Constable Twitten Mystery
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The charming first novel in a new comic crime series from New York Times bestselling author Lynne Truss.
It's 1957, and Inspector Steine rather enjoys his life as a policeman in the seaside British town of Brighton. As far as he's concerned, the town has no criminals, which means no crime, and no stress.
But much to Steine's irritation, there's a new constable in town-the keen and clever Constable Twitten, who sees patterns in small, meaningless burglaries and insists on the strange notion that perhaps all the crime has not been cleared out quite as effectively as Steine thinks.
Worse yet, some of Constable Twitten's ideas could be correct: when renowned theater critic A. S. Crystal arrives in Brighton to tell the detective the secret he knows about the still-unsolved Aldersgate Stick-Up Case of 1945, he's shot dead in his seat.
With a new murder, a new constable, and a new lead on the decades-old mystery, the Brighton Police Force must scramble to solve this delightfully droll mystery in "the funniest crime novel of 2018" (Wall Street Journal).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) makes her crime fiction debut with this hilarious series launch. One morning in 1957, London theater critic A.S. Crystal takes the train to Brighton, where he's to attend the try-out of a new play, A Shilling in the Meter, at the Theater Royal. That same morning, Constable Peregrine Twitten, an eager beaver who won a prize "for forensic observation," reports for duty to Det. Insp. Geoffrey Steine, the less than clever head of the Brighton Constabulary, who in 1945 failed to break the Aldersgate stickup case, to which Crystal, then an assistant bank manager, was a witness. That evening at the Theater Royal, something in the play prompts Crystal to remember a piece of crucial information about the Aldersgate robbery, but he's shot dead before he can share it with the police. Twitten sets out to investigate Crystal's murder and his link to the unsolved case, aided by competent Sgt. James Brunswick and despite lack of support from the feckless Steine. Truss successfully combines wry humor with a fair-play mystery.
