A Matter of Loyalty

January 1954. Mists cover the hills around Selchester. Someone at the research facility known as the Atomic is leaking secrets to Soviet Russia, and when nuclear scientist Bruno Rothesay goes missing, the British Intelligence Services are convinced he’s the mole. Hugo Hawksworth isn’t so sure. Then a body turns up, and Hugo’s instincts are proven correct. But if Rothesay wasn’t selling secrets to the Soviets, who is?

As Hugo digs deeper into buried connections and unlikely coincidences, he knows there’s more to this case than his London superiors believe. But following his instincts will pit him against the Establishment—and tangle him once again in the poisonous legacy of the late Lord Selchester.

As he closes in on the truth, Hugo finds himself confronted by an adversary who will stop at nothing, in a case that will prove the most personal of his career.

With a touch of Downton Abbey, a whisper of Agatha Christie and a nod to John Le Carré, A Matter Of Loyalty is the third and final book in this delightfully classic and witty murder-mystery series.

Elizabeth Edmondson (1948–2016) was born in Chile, educated in Calcutta, London and Oxford, and worked in EFL publishing before turning her hand to writing novels. She had more than thirty books published in a variety of genres, but her lifelong preoccupation was on the one hand with English manners and eccentricities, and on the other with the conflicts of the thirties, the Cold War and espionage, in all of which her family had been involved. The Very English Mysteries, her last series, brought all of these preoccupations together in stories of the fictional cathedral city of Selchester, full of spies, gossip and goings-on.

A lifelong nomad, she lived in five countries and six English counties, founded a youth orchestra, rode horses, rang bells, enjoyed Baroque music and was never without an enormous collection of books, a wardrobe of sleek clothes, and the latest gadgets.

A Matter Of Loyalty, left unfinished at her death in January 2016, has been finished by her son, Anselm Audley, also a published novelist.

Anselm Audley is a fourth-generation writer whose antecedents include authors, linguists, spies and even a dictator. He grew up chiefly in cathedrals, lived in an assortment of historic English towns and landscapes, and was educated at Oxford and the British School at Rome. His passions are stories, landscapes and the past, with honourable mentions for making music, ringing bells and sailing the ocean blue. He now lives in yet another cathedral city.

Anselm is the author of four fantasy novels with a historical twist. More recently, he has written three non-fiction Kindle Singles, combining storytelling with historical understanding to bring the real predicaments of historical figures to life. He also worked as editor and informal story consultant on the two previous books in the Very English Mysteries series.