Death of a Fool (Roderick Alleyn Book 19) (English Edition)

Folkways turn fatal in a very old-fashioned English village, in this witty mystery filled with ingenious detective work (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. The very old ways. This may be 1957, but South Mardian still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at the winter solstice. Theres squabbling, of course, and worselike when one of the rituals main players is found beheaded, everything north of his neck having been neatly lopped off by a ritual sword. Inspector Alleyn does have to contain a certain incredulous amusement at the villages fetishistic embrace of the eighteenth centuryhe does not, for example, have a real passion for morris dancingbut hell try to keep a straight face long enough to find the killer and let South Mardian return to the warm embrace of pre-Industrial Britain. A peerless practitioner of the slightly surreal, English-village comedy-mystery. Kirkus Reviews The doyenne of traditional mystery writers. The New York Times