Devil at the Crossroads
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
Following an acrimonious split from her husband, Helen Pascoe moves her three children from London to Trenoon, a lovely old house in a rural part of Cornwall, inherited by Helen some years earlier.
The whole family soon settles down to its new life near Falmouth, feeling comfortable and happy there, when suddenly the local maritime community around them is stunned by a murder in their midst. A young man is found stabbed and propped up against an ancient standing stone at the crossroads of two narrow lanes overlooking the water, a place where legend says a gibbet once stood.
It is DCI Channon's territory, and when he investigates he finds that the victim is connected to all the Pascoes, including the absent father, as well as to other residents of what was once a humble fishing village but which now includes out-of-towners with considerable wealth. The ramifications of the murder affect everybody; rumour and suspicion are rife, and Channon, aided by the abrasive Sergeant Bowles, find that the murder at the crossroads is one of his most difficult cases.
Praise for Olive Etchells
'The most unnerving crimes of violence are the ones that tear apart small, tightly-knit communities... and Etchells demonstrates this awful process of disintergration.' New York Times Book Review
'Etchells' smoothly written police procedural features an intuitive and sensitive hero, Detective Chief Inspector Channon... (his) compassion for the families of the victims, as well as his ability to synthesise information, leaves the reader eager to see more of him.' Publishers Weekly
'A quiet but suspenseful village mystery' Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Etchells's third contemporary procedural set in Cornwall to feature Det. Chief Insp. Bill Channon (after 2006's Footprints of the Devil) offers little new in terms of either character or plot. After someone slashes the throat of Paul Stradling, a young man with the reputation of a rake, and props the body against a standing stone, Channon and his team, including his ambitious but rough-edged assistant, Sergeant Bowles, investigate. They conduct the usual interviews, quickly focusing on the Pascoe family as people of interest. The oldest Pascoe daughter reveals she was in love with the victim, and her mother admits she was coincidentally at the scene of the crime, near a crossroads, around the time of the murder. The detection consists simply of good, dogged police work, while the tension between Channon and Bowles over the latter's attitude doesn't add much. Other mystery authors, such as Robert Goddard in Beyond Recall, have made better use of the Cornish setting.
