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Zusatztext “A new and exciting talent[in] British crime writing.”–P. D. James “In the finest tradition of British whodunits–constructed with page-turning skill! witty and touching in equal measure! and displaying the crucial awareness that corruption looks innocent and lives next door.” –Bel Mooney Informationen zum Autor Morag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. Her first Sara Selkirk novel! Funeral Music ! was nominated by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for the Dilys Award for the year’s favorite mystery. Her fourth novel! Half Broken Things ! won the 2003 CWA Silver Dagger Award. Morag Joss lives in the country outside the city of Bath and in London. Klappentext IN A CITY OF BEAUTY AND HISTORY! A LITTLE NIGHT MURDER IS BEING COMPOSED... For world-class musicians! Bath is no mecca. But to cellist Sara Selkirk it is home! now invaded by an unbearably sexy Czech composer and his unheralded protégée! who is scoring an opera for a local company. Between the notorious composer and his untried student! Sara does not expect great music. Nor! however! does she expect murder.... With Sara caught up in a stormy relationship with a music-loving and very married police officer! she is privy to the investigation into the first killing. The next victim she knows personally! and Sara is sure of a connection. Alas! someone has composed a perfect score for murder. And she who can detect its melody first—will be the next to die.... Chapter One It was most inconvenient of all for Miss Bevan, of course. Monday was her Oxfam day. Although the shop would be shut because of the bank holiday, she was expected down at the stockroom at ten o'clock to look over some new things. She wondered how many bags there would be, and who from. Often as she picked things over she would try to imagine the frenzied domestic blitzes that produced most of the things that came Oxfam's way, but she never could. She kept her cupboards tidy and their contents current and consequently never needed to update her life in that sudden way, discarding books on invalid cookery and unfashionable hobbies along with macrame plant holders and clothing with ludicrous lapels. It occurred to her that real absent-mindedness lay less in losing things than in keeping them, because woeful inattention could be the only explanation for people hanging on to things like that for so long. But sometimes, and she fancied she could always tell, the bags were handed in not by triumphant turners-out of cupboards but by the slightly guilty relatives of someone 'recently deceased', and she had never got used to the smell that came from those bags whose owners, she felt, must have simply decayed carelessly away rather than actively died. And having died their overdue deaths, they left behind disembodied clouds of a stench like boiled wool sprinkled with damp pepper, which loitered above their empty clothes. No, it was not a job she liked, but when had she ever failed to do a job because she did not like it? She preferred being out front. All you needed for that was confidence and a firm hand. Her mind wandered back to the previous week and how she had (as she had told the Oxfam Area Supervisor) averted a very undesirable incident. Mrs. Silber, so tremulous and slow, was lucky that she had been there to take control of the situation. It was Alice Silber who had been on the till when the young girl and the youth had swept in and pounced on the raccoon coat that had gone on the rail that morning. Alice Silber had said, first thing, 'Oh, Imogen, we can't put that out. They don't let us put any furs out nowadays.' 'That's nonsense,' she had replied. 'It's a perfectly good fur. Someone donated it. Yes, dear, I'm familiar with the arguments, but look how old it is. This coat was made before animal rights were even invented. I'm putting it out.' ...
