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Summary
Summary
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 ).
Author Notes
Lynne Truss was born on May 31, 1955, in Kingston upon Thames, England. She is an English writer and journalist. Her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was a best-seller in 2003.
Truss received a first-class honors degree in English Language and Literature from University College London in 1977. After graduation, she worked for the Radio Times as a sub-editor before moving to the Times Higher Education Supplement as the deputy literary editor in 1978. From 1986 to 1990, she was the literary editor of The Listener and was an arts and books reviewer for The Independent on Sunday before joining The Times in 1991. She currently reviews books for The Sunday Times. She has also written numerous books including Tennyson's Gift; Going Loco; Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation; and Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Anthony Goff, David Higham Assoc. (U.K.). (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Truss transplants the quirky, clever wit that drove her nonfiction best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2004), to fiction in this adaptation of a radio show starring Brighton, England, police officers Steine, Brunswick, and Twitten and featuring assorted oddballs on both sides of the law. Newbie Twitten, who's thought to be too smart for his own good, hopes his career is on the upswing when he happens to be seated beside a malodorous, mean theater critic just as the man is killed. Inspector Steine believes the crime is related to a massacre in Brighton years before, and the ensuing investigation takes delightful twists and turns that reveal sordid secrets and long-ago crimes underlying the resort town's jolly character. It is, at times, difficult to keep track of the numerous characters involved in this post-WWII drama, but a close reading brings rewards. Truss' language, unsurprisingly, sparkles, and her portrayal of class and its exasperating effect on even the British underworld is memorable. Readers of Agatha Christie are a natural audience for this study in peculiarity.--Henrietta Verma Copyright 2018 Booklist