Dead Man Riding: A Nell Bray Mystery

by Gillian Linscott

Overview

After three years of traipsing across Europe with her lovesick, widowed mother, Nell Bray has finally found her way to Oxford University. There she has befriended the beautiful Imogen and the charming Midge.

When the three girls decide to accept an invitation by their male classmates to join a reading party in the country during vacation - accompanied by a dashing philosophy don with a reputation for stirring up trouble - they go against what is quickly becoming the obsolete conventions of the nineteenth-century.

Once they arrive in the country, they are greeted by the unpleasant fact that their host has been accused of murder when a local boy is missing. Rather than return home, however, the six students and their mentor decide to put down their books and put their intellectual prowess to the test by solving the mystery.

This combination of mystery and learning - with some college crushes and loves along the way - makes Dead Man Riding Gillian Linscott's best mystery to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466826434
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/18/2003
Series:	Nell Bray Mysteries , #10
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	325 KB

About the Author

Gillian Linscott worked as a journalist for the Guardian and the BBC before turning to full-time crime writing. Her previous novels, featuring the suffragette detective Nell Bray, have won her the CWA/Ellis Peters Historical Dagger 2000 and the Herodotus Award for Best International Historical Mystery Novel.

Gillian Linscott worked as a journalist for the Guardian and the BBC before turning to full-time crime writing. Her novels featuring the suffragette detective Nell Bray have won her the CWA/Ellis Peters Historical Dagger 2000 and the Herodotus Award for Best International Historical Mystery Novel. Her books include The Perfect Daughter and Dead Man Riding.

Editorial Reviews

Set during the summer of 1900, the superb 10th Nell Bray mystery (after 2001's The Perfect Daughter) turns Victorian convention on its head with delightful results. Nell and two of her girlfriends, Imogen and Midge, all of whom are free-thinking Oxford students, agree to accompany three male students and one young faculty member on a reading holiday. Fellow student Alan has invited the entire party to be his guests on his uncle's Lake District farm. When gunfire meets their arrival, the group soon realizes that they have quite literally walked into the midst of a small but deadly private war. Alan's uncle, dubbed by all the Old Man, is despised by neighbors and townsfolk alike and is suspected of having murdered a local magistrate's son, who has recently disappeared. Sexual tension fuels the fires as Alan and his closest friend, Kit, become points in a volatile triangle with the fair-haired Imogen. Love, or at least lust, is indeed in the air, and none of the group seems to be unaffected. Yet love interests take a back seat when the Old Man's favorite horse gallops up with his master's dead body tied in the saddle. And when the Old Man's will leaves a handsome legacy to the unborn child of his housekeeper, Nell makes up her mind to get to the bottom of things. Linscott has combined a wonderful cast of characters with a clever, unexpected resolution. (Jan. 18) FYI: Linscott's eighth Nell Bray mystery, Absent Friends, won the 2000 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award.

Publishers Weekly

Nell Bray’s tenth case finds the suffragette heroine studying at Oxford at the turn of the century after years of wandering the continent with her mother. As the summer vacation begins, Nell, along with her classmates Midge and Imogen, has accepted the invitation of fellow-student Alan Beston to spend some time reading the classics at his great-uncle’s farm in the Lake District with his friends Kit and Nathan and don Michael Meredith. Arriving at the railroad station that serves the farm, the travelers soon discover that their host, Alan’s uncle, is no hero to his neighbors, who blame him for a list of grievances highlighted by the shooting and disappearance of his neighbor farmer’s son Arthur Mowbray. Though Nell and her friends eventually get settled down in rough quarters at the farm with help from housekeeper Dulcie and young ranch worker Robin, the students are distracted from their books by a series of shocks and misadventures that climax when the Old Man is found dead, tied to the saddle of Sid, his favorite horse. His death places them all under suspicion of foul play, but not until the coroner delivers a verdict of suicide does a second death bring home to Nell (The Perfect Daughter, 2001, etc.) the depth of her misunderstanding of romantic rivalries. Linscott captures the tenor of the times, vividly evokes life on a ranching farm of the period, and presents a complex puzzle with an original solution. Well done.

Kirkus Reviews