A Grave Man - Couverture souple

This is a murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. Verity Browne and Lord Edward Corinth are attending the memorial service in Westminster Abbey for Lord Benyon, killed a few months before when the Hindenburg airship burst into flames as it docked in New Jersey. As the congregation begins to disperse after the service, Edward hears Miss Pitt-Messanger cry for help. Her father is slumped in his seat, stabbed to death with an ancient Assyrian dagger. Edward has no wish to investigate the murder but Verity gets herself invited to Swifts Hill, the ultra-modern house in Kent belonging to the millionaire Sir Simon Castlewood. His wife, Virginia, is one of Verity's school friends and she is looking after Maud Pitt-Messanger who is still grieving for her father. Verity quickly discovers that the old man was a selfish bully who had made his daughter's life a misery and prevented her from marrying the man she loved. By coincidence, Mr Churchill then asks Edward to investigate the Castlewood Foundation which Sir Simon has set up to fund medical research among other worthy projects. Churchill has received information that Sir Simon's protege, the eminent surgeon Dominic Montillo, is using the Foundation to fund his own research into racial types - the so-called science of eugenics. Then Maud Pitt-Messanger is herself stabbed to death with a dagger from Sir Simon's archaeological museum, and Edward and Verity join forces to find her killer - but Verity's distrust of Winston Churchill, and her growing attraction to the young German aristocrat, Adam von Trott, drives a wedge between them which brings them both unhappiness and endangers the outcome of the investigation.

David Roberts worked in publishing for over thirty years, most recently as a publishing director, before devoting his energies to writing full time. He is married and divides his time between London and Wiltshire.