Psycho by the Sea

by Lynne Truss

Overview

In the latest installment of this charming and quirky series, a trio of detectives are faced with the arrival of an escaped criminal with an unlikely penchant for boiling the heads of policemen.

It's September in the British beach town of Brighton, and the city is playing host to weeks of endless rain and some brand new villains.

A trusted member of a local gang has disappeared part way through planning a huge heist; a violent criminal obsessed with boiling the heads of policemen has escaped a local prison, and at Gosling's department store an American researcher has been found dead in the music section.

Inspector Steine has other things on his mind – since the triumphant conclusion to his last case, Steine has so many awards and invitations coming his way that he has had to take on a secretary – but Sergeant Brunswick and Constable 'Clever Clogs' Twitten are both on the case. If only they could work out just who is behind these dastardly acts…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526609878
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	11/09/2021
Series:	Constable Twitten Series , #4
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Lynne Truss is a columnist, writer and broadcaster whose book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves was a New York Times bestseller. She has written extensively for radio, and is the author of seven previous novels. The Constable Twitten series won the Last Laugh award at CrimeFest and was longlisted for the CWA Daggers. Lynne lives in Sussex and London with two dogs.

Editorial Reviews

The witty and action-packed Psycho by the Sea carries readers along in surprising fits and starts, like a bumper-car ride. Elaborate schemes go awry, architectural follies self-destruct and the intelligence of several characters increases ever so slightly. This is a book in which there is candor (if not honor) among thieves.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Hilarious . . . The characters are delightfully overblown, the storyline whimsical . . . the funniest, the quirkiest and the most entertaining read of the bunch.” —BookPage

“Clever, intricately plotted . . . The complicated, often comic relationships among the principal characters provide much of the fun. Truss is unmatched in her ability to balance humor and crime.” —Publishers Weekly

“The craft and care with which author Truss weaves her facts into a richly narrated but utterly hilarious tapestry is amazing. The reader may find himself wondering how she manages to keep her facts straight as she throws his own mental processes into such a delightful muddle.” —New York Journal of Books on A SHOT IN THE DARK

“If P.G. Wodehouse had written a mystery starring the Keystone Kops, it would have read something like Psycho by the Sea, but it might not have been as funny. … The fourth Constable Twitten mystery is a Wodehousian delight, in which the witless Brighton Police are up against an escaped psychiatric patient with a penchant for killing cops.” —Shelf Awareness

“Fans of Truss's series will be delighted by the elaborately plotted misadventures of the inept police officers and the women who manipulate them. The darkly humorous story will appeal to those who enjoy crime with comic overtones.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

2021-08-18
A fourth installment in the endless and lopsided battle between the forces of good and evil in 1957 Brighton.

As Inspector Steine, who shot London gang lord Terence Chambers to death, is feted as a hero, Chambers’ allies plot revenge. Within a few short days, Barrow-Boy Cecil, whose street trade in mechanical bunnies barely conceals his alliance with the local gang, goes missing; Len the Photographer is coshed during a burglary of his archives; psychopathic carpenter Geoffrey Chaucer, who has a history of beheading coppers, escapes from Broadmoor; Nicky Garroway, the Chambers henchman who helped him make his getaway, is murdered; and, worst of all, charlady Palmeira Groynes abruptly abandons her post in the Brighton Police Station. Constable Peregrine Twitten knows that Mrs. Groynes is the criminal mastermind behind every crime in Brighton, but he doesn’t know that she’s targeted Gosling’s department store, whose owner, Harold Gosling, employs as his assistant Adelaide Vine, a criminal with a criminal family pedigree. As ex–Milk Girl Pandora Holden continues her hopeless pursuit of Twitten and Eliza Thorpe, Twitten’s widowed landlady, sets her cap on his dim colleague Sgt. Jim Brunswick, Mrs. Groynes plots to kill Steine and knock over Gosling’s in a heist that will make canny use of the store’s state-of-the-art technology. Truss keeps the teapot simmering with baroque subplots, throwaway jests, and insinuations of further hidden relationships so amusing and disconnected that many readers will lose the thread of the main story. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

As diverting and inconsequential as a Rube Goldberg contraption for committing some felonies and barely preventing others.

Kirkus Reviews