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Raymond Flynn - Page 2
Raymond Flynn
Seascape with BodySeascape with Body


First British Edition Hodder & Stoughton (1995)
Seascape with Body
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
In a wonderfully assured debut, former policeman Raymond Flynn brings an English seaside town and its police force to enthralling and memorable life.
Detective Inspector Robert Graham, exiled to seaside Eddathorpe in November to pick up the pieces of his career, expects anything but excitement.
But isolated, incestuous Eddathorpe hides memories, secrets, festering hatreds. There's the Todd family, who own everything and run everything. There's their connection to the financially suspicious major. And even old-fashioned crime, like the Friday night burglar. And there's the murder. Alice Draper - twenty-three years old, fun-loving and pretty - was everyone's sweetheart. She wasn't fussy: her lovers ranged from the middle-aged Todd brothers to a teenaged tearaway. And years after she died, her murderer is still unpunished and six of her lovers still have lives blighted by unspoken suspicion. When Graham re-opens the case, he finds he has taken the lid off both sleepy Eddathorpe and its police station, as well as incurring the enmity of the senior officer who bungled the original enquiry.
In Robert Graham, Raymond Flynn has created a policeman as sharp, sardonic and memorable as Colin Dexter's celebrated Inspector Morse.

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