Tangle

Murder is on the cards…

When Arnold Peabody dies, nobody but his grasping cousin Edith takes much notice.

A quiet, ineffectual little man, he was lost following the death of his domineering mother — and took his own life shortly after her demise.

The death of Mildred Hewitt, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.

A pillar of society and formidable matriarch in Avenridge, Mildred falls to her death from a local beauty spot one snowy night a few weeks after Arnold’s death.

Like Arnold, her son Gilbert is helpless without the commanding presence of his mother…but Gilbert goes even more spectacularly off the rails.

Puffed up with his own sense of self-importance and twisted sense of reality, Gilbert is entirely incapable of life on his own.

He decides, as Arnold had done, to visit a local medium in the hope of obtaining some contact with his mother from beyond the grave — something, anything, that will tell him what to do.

There he meets the mysterious Veronica, who quickly becomes his guardian angel…or does she have a more sinister motivation for inserting herself into Gilbert’s life?

Chief Inspector Henry Beaumont, a frequent visitor to Avenridge since his years there as an evacuee, finds himself increasingly involved in the Hewitt case — which smells of murder.

The case of Arnold Peabody, and its similarity to the Hewitt case, flickers at the back of his mind and Henry begins to wonder if the two deaths are not connected.

Incidents from his childhood, blurred by time, return to haunt him as Gilbert spirals into madness, stirring up memories of old scandals and bringing long-forgotten people back into play.

As Henry unpeels layer upon layer of old scandal and undreamed-of connections, Veronica becomes ever more elusive, leading him to wonder if he can find her before tragedy strikes yet again…

Tangle is a thrilling murder mystery novel, so full of drama and suspense that you won’t be able to put it down.

Meg Elizabeth Atkins has won many plaudits for her fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, and reviewers have compared her to Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym for the elegance of her writing. In several of her earlier novels, such as Samain, Palimpsest and Tangle, she has explored the disturbing undercurrents beneath the polite surface of English middle-class life, and in Cruel as the Grave forces erupt through the repression and containment of daily existence with violent consequences.

Meg Elizabeth Atkins lives with her husband in a North Yorkshire village. She teaches creative writing and her other books include By The North Door, Cruel As The Grave and Samain.