Case of the Abominable Snowman
A macabre surprise awaits beneath the snow...
All is warm and bright for the Christmas Eve gathering at the manor. Yet as the clock nears midnight, the evening takes a disturbing turn when the family cat begins to dash its head against the walls.
Could the cat be possessed, and the manor haunted? Or was foul play involved? Weeks later, when the thawing snow reveals an even more sinister sight, it becomes clear that someone is up to no good – but who?
Luckily Nigel Strangeways, one of fiction's most delightful private investigators, is on hand to charm the eccentrics, outwit the police and unravel this murderous mystery.
‘A master of detective fiction’ Daily Telegraph
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.