Rough Cider

The author of the highly acclaimed The False Inspector Dew and The Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray mysteries presents a tense and gripping crime novel about a lonely college professor who is haunted by the arrest and murder conviction of a G.I. in World War II England.

“When I was nine, I fell in love with a girl of twenty called Barbara, who killed herself.”

Theo, a university lecturer, has his early life brought uncomfortably back when, in 1964 he is approached by an American girl called Alice. She wants to be told about her father, a GI hanged for murder in Somerset during World War II. As a boy, Theo had been a principal witness for the prosecution.

Alice persuades him to revisit the farm where Theo was evacuated. She is too young to have known her father, but is staunchly determined to discover the true facts. The horrors of the past take on a frightening immediacy when another murder is committed.