The Serpent Pool
A Lake District Mystery
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"An unusual and challenging puzzle mystery that will keep [you] guessing until the final pages. Wow!" —Library Journal STARRED review
Seven years ago, Bethany Friend was found drowned in mere inches of water in the lonely Serpent Pool in England's Lake District. Was it suicide or murder? Now, determined to win justice for Bethany's dying mother, DCI Hannah Scarlett of the Cold Case Squad re-opens the case.
But Hannah has problems of her own: a new sergeant with a reputation for causing trouble, a new house close to the Serpent Pool, and new cause to doubt her partner, second-hand bookseller Marc Amos. Worried by dwindling finances and the horrific death of one of his best customers, Marc finds himself drawn to the lovely and enigmatic Cassie Weston, who works in his shop.
Then Hannah meets Louise Kind, sister of historian Daniel Kind. Louise has been living with book collector and lawyer Stuart Wagg, and has just confessed to her brother that she struck Wagg with a knife. Searching for the supposed victim, Hannah and Daniel—who is writing a book about the brilliant but opium-addicted 19th-century English writer Thomas De Quincey—encounter dark secrets and strange obsessions that oddly echo De Quincey's drug-fueled writings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The musty, sedate world of old books provides the backdrop for a series of gruesome murders in Edwards's absorbing fourth Lake District mystery (after 2007's The Arsenic Labyrinth). Rare book dealers prove an unexpectedly randy lot as they are swept under by sexual undercurrents of obsession, infidelity, and jealousy. Inevitably, desire proves the undoing of one victim after another, as the sociopath responsible, obsessed by Thomas De Quincey's tract On Murder, fulfills his "destiny... to make nightmares come true." Leave it to Det. Chief Insp. Hannah Scarlett to find the link between a cold case, the murder of 25-year-old aspiring writer Bethany Friend (or was it suicide?), found drowned in a shallow pool six years earlier, and two active investigations, though not before letting her own conflicted desires get the better of her when her current lover, a secondhand bookseller, falls under suspicion. Hannah's odd failure to pursue a line of questioning with another suspect also spells trouble.
