The Babes in the Wood
The nineteenth Wexford novel published by Hutchinson in 2002
If I were to kill Wexford, there’d be an outcry. I have thought I might write a novel which would be published posthumously, but if I write anything, I really want it to be published. I don’t want it hanging round in a bank.
The River Brede has burst its banks, and not a single house in the valley has escaped flooding. Even where Wexford lives, higher up in Kingsmarkham, the waters had nearly reached the mulberry tree in his once immaculate garden.
The Subaqua Task Force can find no trace of two local teenagers who have gone missing along with their sitter, Joanna Troy. Their hysterical mother remains convinced that all three have drowned, and as the hours stretch into days, Wexford suspects a case of kidnapping, perhaps connected with an unusual sect called the Church of the Good Gospel.
But when the sitter’s smashed-up car is found at the bottom of a local quarry—occupied by a battered corpse—the investigation takes on a very different hue.
Notes
In Pictures: the floods of 2000.
Ten years on: Lewes remembers the floods.
Contemporary Reads 2
Karin Fossum - Black Seconds
Julian Earwaker & Kathleen Becker - Scene of the Crime
Sarah Waters - Fingersmith
Arnaldur Indriðason - The Silence of the Grave
Haruki Murakami - Kafka On The Shore
Michael Dibdin - And Then You Die
Footnotes
If I were to kill Wexford, there’d be an outcry. Independent 2013. ↩︎
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