Severn House Publishers
Featuring: Anna Hopkins; Professor Lowell; Isadora Salzman
235 pages ISBN: 0727885952 EAN: 9780727885951 Kindle: B01ELBADL4 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
If you read THE WHITE SHEPHERD which is the first book
in
the Oxford Dogwalkers Mystery series, you will be
keen to
see what the female dog owners get up to next. Previously
the Shepherd dog owned by Anna Hopkins showed that she had
a nose for trouble, sniffing out a dead body in parkland.
WRITTEN IN RED takes up near Christmas in the university
town with the scent of orange muffins as a more welcome
background.
Tragically a senior professor is assaulted in his rooms
and
found injured by the porter. Nobody yet suspects Professor
Lowell's quiet unmarried life hid a tragic mistake in his
past. But someone knew - someone who was not prepared to
let him away with it for ever. Anna is a staff member
doing
admin in the college, so she has to help with notifying
students of cancelled classes and so on. Back at her flat
she finds one of her dogwalker friends Isadora Salzman has
been sent a malicious letter. Could the same person who
harmed the professor be threatening her?
The tale harks back to the 1960s when some of the Oxford
fraternity were young and impressionable, recovering from
the war fought or endured by their parents while
threatened
by a looming menace of nuclear war and communism. Diary
excerpts fills in the blanks where memories fail. As a
pleasant counterpoint the dogs need to be exercised in the
snow, providing some tranquil and attractive scenes and
allowing Anna to do some serious thinking.
This story is full of character, from the fridge which
contains five lemons and several bottles of tonic, to the
oak-furnished house and lavish Christmas tree of an artist
who has a fear of ending up poor and homeless. As the
diary
entries are all in italics I find them hard on the eyes,
but there are not too many of them and the sixties are
rather evoked by conversation. With all the jollity around
the Christmas preparations it's not the usual suspense
novel, but don't blink because someone is about to get
hurt.
Annie Dalton has equalled her first crime story with
WRITTEN IN RED so anyone who enjoys a modern British story
full of intelligence and atmosphere will have a good time.
Loving dogs would be a help, but the story is not set at
dog shows so the pets are just part of normal life for our
heroine and her stalwart friends.
The murder of a college professor has its roots in the
Cold War: the new Oxford Dogwalkers mystery from
award-winning YA writer Annie Dalton.
Shortly before Christmas, Professor James Lowell is found
brutally attacked in his rooms at Walsingham College, where
Anna Hopkins works as an administrator. Baffled as to why
anyone would wish to harm such a gentle, scholarly man, Anna
discovers that Lowell had a connection with her fellow
dogwalker, Isadora Salzman, who knew him as an undergraduate
in the 1960s, a co-member of the so-called Oxford Six. It
turns out that Isadora has been keeping a surprising secret
all these years. But someone else knows about Isadora’s
secret: someone who has sent her a threatening, frightening
letter.
Could the attack on Professor Lowell have its roots in a
50-year-old murder? And who is targeting Isadora and the
surviving members of the Oxford Six? Anna, Isadora and
Tansy, the dogwalking detectives, make it their business to
find out.
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