Lestrade Series

Lestrade’s detectives at Scotland Yard have promised him that 1910 is going to be a peaceful year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. His daughter, Emma, brings him news of a tragic boating accident and he is soon up to his neck in a series of vicious murders. On top of all this, Lestrade is roped in to help with the coronation of George V and Inspector Walter Dew needs help with the disappearance of a certain Belle Crippen. While Lestrade has his hands full, Mr Frederick Seddon is letting out the top flat of his house to elderly spinsters, and new bride Sarah Rose wanders forlornly around the National Gallery, waiting for George Joseph Smith.

Recovering from a broken leg after his ignominious fall from the Titanic, Lestrade should have had a peaceful time convalescing. But an attempt on the life of his future father-in-law makes him realise that a policeman is never really off duty. What is particularly puzzling is the arrival of a letter which simply reads "Four for the Gospel Makers", and it isn’t the first Lestrade has been sent. So begins one of Sholto Lestrade’s most mystifying cases, encompassing both the present and the past. He walks down memory lane, looking back on episodes in his career which never came to satisfactory conclusions and hold other clues as to who the sender of the letters is. Because whoever it is, is a cold-blooded killer.

The papers call it suicide. The deceased’s father doesn’t. And when Superintendent Lestrade investigates the death by duelling pistol of Anstruther Fitzgibbon, his suspicions are immediately aroused. One of Britain’s leading athletes, Fitzgibbon is the first victim in a series of murders which threatens to extinguish the torch of the Olympic Games in London, in that glorious summer of 1908. When a hurdler of the ladies’ team falls victim to her own bust improver, fingers are pointed in all directions, and not the least of Lestrade’s worries is that he is dogged by an investigative journalist, whose husband is a jealous American detective with a short temper.

England in 1920 is a land fit for heroes. So why is one of those heroes found dead in a dingy London hotel? And why does his war record show that he has been missing for three years? The deceased is the fiancé of Inspector Lestrade’s daughter, and she sets out to find his murderer. As always with Lestrade, one murder has a habit of leading to another. How can a woman killed in an air raid in 1917 be found with a bullet through her head three years later? A colourful web of intrigue unfolds as Lestrade and his daughter go undercover. When Lestrade’s daughter is kidnapped, the writing is on the wall. And the writing says "MI5".

“And death shall come on soft wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh.” The wings that retired Superintendent Lestrade comes on are those of a de Haviland Hercules. The archaeologist Howard Carter has made the discovery of the century in the Valley of the Kings but all around him, men are dying. Lord Carnarvon, careless with his razor, falls prey to a mosquito bite. Alain Le Clerk leaves the tomb in a hurry to die alone in the desert. Aaron G. String, the railway magnate, blows his brains out yards from the tomb’s entrance. And so it is that Sholto Lestrade flies East to solve a riddle every bit as impenetrable as that of the Sphinx.

Lestrade had never been arrested before, although he had often had his collar felt by unsuspecting constables. But now a woman has died in his arms in a London pea-souper and he is not only arrested, but facing the drop. Millicent Millichip, in the wrong place at the right time is neither the first nor only in a series of murders by someone so cunning that all the brains of the Yard can’t catch them – and this despite the calling card left helpfully at every scene. In his time, Lestrade has found it hard enough to follow a case, but from the condemned cell in Pentonville it is even harder.

Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling! Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth. Will any of them live to tell Dew’s tale? The tale of a rat.