A Shot in the Dark

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).