Dorothy Bowers

Shadows Before (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"It won't be much longer now. Keep your head and hold your tongue."

In Shadows Before, events from the past are the catalyst for murder. In hope of a fresh start after being acquitted of the murder of his sister-in-law, Matthew Weir has moved his family to Spanwater, a remote manor in the Cotswolds. But his heiress wife Catherine is traumatised by her sister's death and Matthew's trial, and has retreated into childhood memories, believing she is living in the Welsh border cottage of her childhood. Hired to keep Catherine safe in her wanderings, companion Aurelia Brett is fleeing poverty and hunger in London, Matthew's brother Augustus is trying to elude past debts. His nephew is haunted by the death of his father. Then Catherine dies suddenly, and arsenic is found in her home-made tea. Evidence suggests someone in the house, but Chief Inspector Pardoe finds conflicting clues and suspicious behaviour among Spanwater's neighbours too. When a second death occurs, Pardoe - and the reader - must decide which shadows points to the perpetrator and why.

Dorothy Bowers (1902 - 1948) was a champion of "fair play" mysteries, in which all the clues are cunningly displayed within the context of the story.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Moonstone Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Mai 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781899000197
• Artikelnr.: 61975386

Autorenporträt

Dorothy Violet Bowers (1902-1948) was born in Leominster, the daughter of a confectioner. The family moved to Monmouth in 1903 where her father ran his own bakery until he retired in 1936. Educated at the Monmouth High School for Girls, Bowers received a scholarship for Oxford and, displaying the dogged tenacity evident throughout her short life, sat the Latin entrance exam three times before she was finally accepted. Women had only recently been able to get degrees at Oxford and Bower's sister Evelyn also joined her there, which suggests a familial focus on education. In 1926, Bowers graduated from the Society of Oxford Home-Students (now St Anne's College) with a third class honours degree in Modern History, and spent the next few years pursuing a career as a history teacher. Subsequent letters to her college principal documented her worries about family finances ("my father....our university careers have been a heavy expense to him.") and her desire to break away from Monmouth ("I have a dread of finding work in a small pleasant county-town such as this. The temptation to crystallize would be too great.") Temporary jobs teaching history and English did not inspire her and she turned to writing; letters to friends documented the slow, uphill battle to get published. During this time, she supplemented her income by compiling crossword puzzles for John O'London Weekly under the pseudonym "Daedalus". Bowers published four Inspector Pardoe novels in rapid succession: Postscript to Poison (1938), Shadows Before (1939), Deed without a Name (1940) and Fear For Miss Betony (1941). Fear For Miss Betony was heralded by the Times of London as the best mystery of 1941, stating "Every page bears witness to a brain of uncommon powers". The outbreak of war brought Bowers to London, where she worked in the European News Service of the BBC. Her final book, The Bells at Old Bailey, was published in 1947, with Pardoe replaced by another Scotland Yard detective, Raikes. Never of robust health, Bowers contracted tuberculosis during this period and eventually succumbed to the disease in August, 1948. She died knowing that she had been inducted into the prestigious Detection Club, the only writer selected for membership in 1948.