The Killings at Badger's Drift
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4.1 • 29 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A quaint English village is home to a murderer in the Macavity Award-wining mystery series debut that launched the British crime drama Midsomer Murders.
Badger's Drift is the ideal English village, complete with vicar, bumbling local doctor, and kindly spinster. But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up a fuss loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby. And when Barnaby and his eager-beaver deputy start poking around, they uncover a swamp of ugly scandals and long-suppressed resentments seething below the picture-postcard prettiness.
In the grand English tradition of the quietly intelligent copper, Barnaby has both an irresistibly dry sense of humor and a keen insight into what makes people tick. The Killings at Badger's Drift marks Inspector Barnaby's debut, and offers ample proof that Caroline Graham may indeed be "simply the best detective writer since Agatha Christie" (Sunday Times of London).
"Murder most pleasing . . . a corking good mystery." —Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The British author makes her debut here in an uncommonly appealing mystery, set in a tranquil village, Badger's Drift. Learned Chief Inspector Barnaby and callow Sergeant Troy go to work when importunate, elderly Miss Bellringer insists that her friend, Emily Simpson, did not die of a heart attack as her doctor claimed, but was murdered. An autopsy proves Miss Bellringer right; Emily had imbibed a Socratic mix of wine and hemlock. Spreading alarm throughout the community, an unseen murderer strikes again, leaving sly Mrs. Rainbird's bloody corpse to be found by her son, the local undertaker. As Barnaby and Troy investigate, they turn up evidence of another crime years earlier, and several suspects. Among them are the doctor's promiscuous wife, a young woman whose brother objects to her marriage to a rich widower and a Lady Chatterley-type gamekeeper. Diligent detecting brings the chief and his bumbling assistant to a sensational expose. Graham makes the characters humanly believable in her witty and tragic novel, a real winner.
