Dead Man Riding
A Nell Bray Mystery
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. FYI:Linscott's eighth Nell Bray mystery,Absent Friends, won the 2000 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award.
