Nicholas Rhea

Page Updated: 14/11/2006

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

Nicholas Rhea - Page 3

Constable along the River-bank

Garland for a Dead Maiden

Constable goes to Market

Constable Over the Bridge

The Sniper

Paperback - Hale (2003)

First British Edition Hale (2002)

Constable along the River-bank
Most police officers contemplate promotion, and Constable Nick of Aidensfield is no exception. As he ponders leaving the village in a bid for higher rank, his wife begins her new job but she doesn't want to leave their happy moorland home.
Despite Nick's personal dilemma, his rustic constabulary duties continue apace. There is drama when children go missing - 14-year-old Emily vanishes from home and, in a separate incident, young Craig plays truant from school - and there is more alarm when a man disappears in the river.
Cars get stuck in the river too. Twin artists, Prudence and Priscilla, who share the painting of watercolours, find their precious motor car in the river and it requires a hearse to rescue it while a newcomer thinks local elves have helped recover his car from the beck.
Then when old Zachariah Isaac Pentecost (Zip for short) is taken ill, Nick discovers he has a long-lost son, but where is his son now? And what is the secret of the toy railway which is always set out in Zip's house?
As ever, Claude Jeremiah Greengrass causes problems, not only with his illegal egg delivery service but also when his house key is stolen and when his bus driving leads to a mini-riot in the pub.
And how does Nick persuade a Pyrenean mountain dog to vacate a chair? It's all part of the daily routine for Constable Nick of Aidensfield.

First British Edition Constable & Robinson (2002)

Garland for a Dead Maiden
Millicent Puke, the devoted wife of Detective Inspector Montague Pluke, stumbles across a woman’s body by Devil’s Dump, a pool in a remote North Yorkshire moorland stream. Her discovery means Pluke must steel himself not to hunt forgotten horse troughs - the great passion of his life - but instead to track down a Murderer.
As his enquiries intensify, Pluke suspects the ruined Trough House may provide important clues and when he discovers the body has previously been buried but flushed from its well-hidden grave by the ferocious St. Margaret’s Day flood, his knowledge of moorland folklore becomes vital to the investigation.
A maiden’s garland was discovered with the body, but why would a murderer take the time and trouble to bury the garland - a symbol of purity - with the victim?
Pluke’s research unearths the worrying fact that others have also died in Devil’s Dump. In 1821 a shepherd named Featherstone drowned in its depths and again, in 1872, a tragedy occurred there when another Featherstone died - this time the victim was a six-year-old girl who was later buried with a maiden’s garland. And now Susan Featherstone has gone missing from the dale - and she is an agent for an artist who always depicts a shepherd in her paintings of the moors. But the artist too has gone missing, so is Susan a victim - or a killer?
And so it comes about that the eccentric Detective Inspector Pluke must dig deep into the family histories of Thordale if he is to resolve the mystery of the maiden’s garland.
`Detectives, in fiction at least, come in all shapes and sizes but few make as much initial impact as Montague Pluke . . . The strength of the book lies in the characters, especially the eccentric Pluke and his wife, Millicent. But a rich seam of secondary characters wait in the wings . . . It’s original, it’s funny - discovering Pluke has been one of life’s little pleasures.’ Yorkshire Post

First British Edition Hale (2002)

Constable goes to Market
For the villagers of Aidensfield and district, the market towns provide a focus for their business activities as well as their social outings, and Ashfordly is no exception. Normally quiet and peaceful, it comes alive with traders and customers on market day - and such gatherings are never without problems for Constable Nick. As he goes about his rustic constabulary duties, he sympathizes with members of the Thumbstick Club when someone steals their precious sticks, copes with a wandering flock of geese on the village green and deals with near disaster when Greengrass's dog, Alfred, demolishes market stalls in his quest to catch a white rabbit and wonders how a live hand grenade came to be left among the potatoes. The area continues to reveal eccentric characters, like old Mr Galbraith whose ambition is to freewheel as far as possible in his car, or Twelve-pint Pete who can't resist the challenge of drinking a yard of ale in record time. Sightings of an Arab, an American Indian, a Laughing Cavalier, a city gent and a UFO cause some puzzlement. There are linguistic misunderstandings, people behaving with typical British stupidity and even a crime or two - it's all in a day's work for Constable Nick of Aidensfield, the policeman who inspired Heartbeat.

First British Edition Hale (2001)

Constable Over the Bridge
Under the watchful eye of Constable Nick, the villagers of Aidensfield continue their rustic lives deep in the North York Moors of the 1960s.
Greengrass almost ruins Sergeant Craddock’s accident-free statistics when a henhouse falls off his lorry while Nick copes with a couple of determined lady shoplifters, a witness who can’t remember what she saw, a roadman whose daily sandwiches are stolen and a man with a penchant for searching dustbins to find old socks. An ancient Aidensfield custom is revived in a tug-of-war which spans the river with Greengrass as anchor man, then Constable Nick performs some very special duties, such as traffic control at the funeral of a donkey or searching for a couple of stone badgers who went for a midnight walk.
Only a small portion of a village constable’s work is associated with crime, however: there were the villagers who helped a lady who had lost an heirloom; the tragic couple for whom everything went spectacularly wrong; and a surprise Royal visitor who poses a problem of secrecy for Constable Nick.
It’s all in this latest collection of tales from Aidensfield.

First British Edition Constable (2001)

The Sniper
Arriving in the small Yorkshire village of Roberthorpe to investigate the death of an elderly, church-going man, DS Mark Pemberton can think of only one word when he sees the crime scene - execution. Kenneth Flint was not killed in an outburst of violent temper, he was shot once in the chest, the gunman was a professional, and he left not a trace behind him. But why should someone want to go to such lengths to dispose of a seemingly harmless old man?
As Pemberton’s team begin to dig, Flint’s unsavoury character comes rumbling to the surface. The villagers kept their children away from him and one or two other police forces have him on their files. So it looks as if this is a revenge killing - and there are quite a few people saying good riddance.
Then another murder in a different part of the country but with all the same hallmarks, throws Pemberton’s investigation into disarray. And a third makes it certain that the killer is on some sort of mission. All Pemberton has to do to catch his man is find the link between the three murders. With so much ground to cover and no forensic evidence to work with it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Ironic then that it should be something as small as an orange pip which proves the sniper’s undoing.