A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (Inspector Ramsay Series #3)

by Ann Cleeves

Overview

For Dorothea Cassidy, Thursdays were special. Every week she would look forward to the one day she could call her own, and would plan to visit people she wanted to see as a welcome respite from the routine duties that being a vicar's wife entailed. But one Thursday in June was to be more special than any other. It was the day that Dorothea Cassidy was strangled. As the small town of Otterbridge prepares for its summer carnival, Inspector Stephen Ramsay begins a painstaking reconstruction of Dorothea's last hours. He soon discovers that she had taken on a number of deserving cases—a sick and lonely old woman, a disturbed adolescent, a compulsive gambler, a single mother with a violent boyfriend and a child in care—and even her close family have their secrets to hide. All these people are haunted, in one way or another, by Dorothea's goodness. But which of them could have possibly wanted her dead?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509856244
Publisher:	Pan Macmillan
Publication date:	02/01/2019
Series:	Inspector Ramsay Series , #3
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ann Cleeves is the author of the bestselling Shetland Island series, which includes Raven Black, White Nights, and Cold Earth, and the Vera Stanhope series, which includes The Crow Trap. These series are the bases for the television shows Shetland (on Amazon) and Vera (on Hulu). She has written over 25 novels, and her books have sold over one million copies worldwide. In 2006 she was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel for Raven Black. In 2012 she was inducted into the CWA Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame.

Editorial Reviews

"A fine writer." —Sunday Telegraph


"Cleeves is quietly carving out a reputation as the new Queen of Crime." —Sunday Mirror


"Ann Cleeves is a skilful technician, keeping our interest alive and building slowly up to the denouement. Her easy use of language and clever story construction make her one of the best natural writers of detective fiction." —Daily Express


"Nobody does unsettling undercurrents better than Ann Cleeves." —Val McDermid, author, A Place of Execution


"Ann Cleeves has an enviable talent . . . I love these books." —CrimeSquad

From the Publisher

Cleeves ( Murder in My Backyard ) allows her respect for the traditional mystery to fossilize her writing into a formula. The victim is the vicar's wife. The setting is a prototypical English town during a fair. The detective, Inspector Ramsay, is an unmarried and singularly brainy member of the constabulary ably assisted by a loyal sergeant who desperately desires action, not theories. Ramsay is as mundane and conventional as the trappings, as he tries to understand the victim while tracing her last hours of life. Meanwhile a succession of suspects is paraded for the reader's inspection, including the victim's stepson, his insecure girlfriend, a half-witted young man half in love with the victim, a dying widow, a social worker and an alcoholic ne'er-do-well. Unfortunately, none of them grabs our attention or loyalty, even after the half-wit is the victim of the inevitable second murder. The pace slowly picks up after that, and the concluding 20 or so pages are suspenseful and fast-paced, but they seem slim reward for readers who must slog through the first 190 pages of cliched two-dimensionality to get there. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly