An Air That Kills: The Lydmouth Crime Series Book 1

Description

Workmen in the small market town of Lydmouth are demolishing an old cottage. A sledgehammer smashes into what looks like a solid wall. Instead, layers of wallpaper conceal the door of a locked cupboard which holds a box - and in the box is the skeleton of a young baby. Items within the box suggest that the baby was entombed early in the nineteenth century, but when another man is also found dead, the evidence suggests that the baby's death is more recent than it seems and that a killer is on the loose . . . Journalist Jill Francis, newly arrived from London, has her first assignment.

Andrew Taylor has worked as a boatbuilder, wages clerk, librarian, labourer and publisher's reader. He has written many crime novels as well as children's books and lives with his wife and their two children in the Forest of Dean, on the borders of England and Wales.

'The most under-rated crime writer in Britain today' -- Val McDermid 'Captures perfectly the drab atmosphere and cloying morality of the 1950s ... Taylor is an excellent writer. He plots with care and intelligence and the solution to the mystery is satisfyingly chilling' -- The Times 'There is no denying Taylor's talent, his almost Victorian prose exudes a quality uncommon among his contemporaries... his eye for detail and an enviable ability to dissect relationships and communal habits make for a pleasurable read' -- Time Out 'Engrossing launch of a series... Taylor subtly weaves the threads of this thoughtful, melancholy tale until they become an interlaced whole before the reader's eyes' -- Publishers Weekly