A Death in C Minor

A DEATH IN C MINOR follows young American concert pianist Jessica Beaumont. Determined to rebuild her life following the death of her young son, a bitter divorce and a suicide attempt, Jessica retreats to a 17th century cottage in rural England. But she soon learns that life in the village of Kenwick isn’t the idyll she imagined. A year earlier, Peter Chandler, a mysterious newcomer to the village, had been hacked to death in his manor house with his own kitchen cleaver. The case remains unsolved until it’s reopened by Detective Inspector Mick Chandra of New Scotland Yard.

Like Jess, Mick Chandra harbors a few ghosts of his own—a childhood spent on the mean streets of industrial Liverpool and a father murdered in a robbery. Welsh on his

mother's side and Kerala Indian on his father’s, Mick attributes his keen instincts as an investigator to his grandmother, who was a seer in her village in India. He has succeeded as an investigator despite the racial tensions that still divide England’s most elite police force.

As Mick begins to question the villagers, his list of suspects grows to include an adulterous vicar; an unscrupulous Cambridge don; a neglected, love-starved wife; a retired octogenarian army colonel; a loss-stricken daughter; and Adam Marr, a devastatingly handsome wealthy landowner with whom Jess had a brief affair when she first arrived in Kenwick.

Against the backdrop of Chandler’s violent murder, and though deeply wounded from failed marriages, Mick and Jess find themselves falling in love. Consequently Jess stirs the hostility of the villagers.

Under pressure from his superiors to close the case, Mick must find Peter Chandler's murderer and bring him to justice. But who is the murderer: the local laird, the cheating vicar, or perhaps the wealthy commodities trader? Or does it take a village to commit a murder?

A DEATH IN C MINOR takes the reader on a journey fraught with danger, love, and intrigue, where the unexpected becomes the norm. The surprise ending will astonish even the most jaded readers of mystery fiction.