Overview

""Murder most pleasing...a corking good mystery."" --Los Angeles Times This award-winner is the first of the Inspector Barnaby novels and inspiration for the staggeringly popular Midsomer Murders TV series--24 seasons and counting! It's no wonder the Sunday Times called Caroline Graham ""simply the best detective writer since Agatha Christie."" Badger's Drift is the ideal English village, complete with vicar, bumbling local doctor, and kindly spinster with a nice line in homemade cookies. But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up a fuss loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby. And when Barnaby and his eager-beaver deputy start poking around, they uncover a swamp of ugly scandals and long-suppressed resentments seething beneath the hollyhocks. In the grand English tradition of the quietly intelligent copper, Barnaby has both a bone dry sense of humor and a keen eye for what makes people tick. Badger's Drift has won the Macavity Awards for Best First Mystery and has proved itself a crime-drama classic.

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9781631943294

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Reviews

""A delightful village mystery that observes the conventions of whodunits without taking them too seriously"" --Memphis Commercial Appeal ""A fine example of the English village whodunnit"" --Derby Evening Telegraph ""A peaceful, civilized, stylish whodunit"" --Liverpool Daily Post ""Distinguished by an excellent complicated plot, lots of red herrings, and a noteworthy surprise solution, plus enough twists and turns to keep even the most hardened mystery reader puzzled"" --Pittsburgh Press ""Graham has a real gift for vivid, believable character sketches"" --San Francisco Examiner ""Readers will be engaged and titillated until the very end"" --Evansville Courier ""Uncommonly appealing...a real winner, with a shocker of an ending"" --Bennington Banner

Author Information

Caroline Graham was born in Warwickshire, UK, on July 17, 1931. Graham received a degree in theater writing from the University of Birmingham, but she held a number of jobs before settling on writing. She attended ballet school in Paris, ran a marriage bureau, worked in a factory, served in the Royal Navy, and worked as an actress and radio broadcaster, among other things. After attempting a variety of genres, including writing for the long-running British series Crossroads, Graham wrote the first Barnaby novel, The Killings at Badger's Drift, which was an instant hit and was eventually selected by the Crime Writers' Association as one of the hundred best crime novels of all time. Starting in 1997, the Barnaby books were adapted into the immensely successful television series Midsomer Murders; the author herself has cameos in some early episodes, and it's still running now! Graham lives in Suffolk, England.

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