Lively Dead - Couverture souple

Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world. The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children's literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers' Association for two books running: The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (1968) and The Old English Peepshow (1969). A collection of Dickinson's poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.

In this mystery from CWA Gold Dagger winner Peter Dickinson, a landlady discovers a corpse beneath her crowded London boardinghouse A sturdy young woman with a knack for home repair and a practical sense of Marxism, Lydia is renovating her London townhouse while her husband finishes law school. To bring in extra money, she rents her upper floors to the exiled government of Livonia, a Baltic state that was long ago absorbed into the Soviet Union. One day, as Lydia is taking up the floorboards, the Livonians carry a coffin through the house. It bears their housekeeper, who is to be honored with vodka toasts and a solemn funeral. After the ceremony, Lydia returns to her floorboards. Beneath the rotted wood is dirt-and in the dirt, she discovers a corpse that never reached the graveyard. Identifying the body and finding the person who stashed it there draws Lydia into a tangle of spies and counterspies as her quiet little boardinghouse becomes a new front in the global Cold War.