Charity Ends at Home
“I am in great danger … I know that murder is going to be the reward for my uncomplaining loyalty.”
This letter containing heartfelt and urgent pleas for help is received by three very eminent citizens of Flaxborough, including the Chief Constable himself. So when one of the town’s most tireless charity workers, Mrs Henrietta Palgrove, is found the wrong way up in her garden pond, a connection seems likely.
Yet Detective Inspector Purbright finds the case does not quite add up and it takes the acute wits of his old friend, the ever-charming Miss Lucilla Teatime, as well as the more unwitting help of Mortimer Hive, indifferent private investigator and accomplished ladies’ man, to tease out the real murderer.
Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson’s tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay.
Colin Watson was born in 1920 in Croydon, England. At age 17 he was appointed cub reporter on the Boston Guardian, a local newspaper in a Lincolnshire market town. His years as a journalist there proved a formative experience, and he collected then much of the material that formed the basis for the Flaxborough novels. He won two CWA Silver Dagger awards, and the Flaxborough series was adapted for television by the BBC under the title Murder Most English. He died in 1983.