Murder for Treasure

Could the takeover of Rigley’s Patent Footbalm by the giant American Hutstacker Chemical Corporation really be scuppered by Mrs. Ogmore Davies’s parrot finding a body in Panty Harbour?It looked like it, but banker sleuth Mark Treasure, British banking’s answer to Emma Lathen, took a different view when a second body was discovered the morning after he arrived in the little West Wales sailing village close to St. David’s. By then Treasure had already survived a murderous assault aboard the Fishguard Express, a pitched battle on Whitland Station, and the inexplicable disappearance of a battered Australian clergyman. And that was only the start of his exceedingly unquiet weekend. It was to involve his host, the eccentric Judge Henry Nott-Herbert, a T-shirted detective-inspector, the high-powered, lady-fancying head of Hutstacker’s and his understanding wife, a local schemer with a siren spouse, two children, an immense Irish wolfhound, a tone-deaf Welsh vicar, and a pacifist postman.It also involved the breathtakingly lovely Anna, the young German widow already promised in marriage to someone more than twice her age.As always, it’s a fast-moving, witty and baffling mystery—the first from David Williams set in his native Wales. “He goes on improving steadily,” said the late Edmund Crispin in the Sunday Times of his last novel. He does indeed.