[Owen Burns 02] • The Seven Wonders of Crime

A man dies of thirst in an isolated shed with a full carafe of water beside him. Another is stabbed in a pergola surrounded by a sea of mud, but there are no other footprints.

People are dying at an alarming rate, people with no apparent connection to one another save for a cryptic painting sent to the police before each murder. That, and the fact that each crime appears to have been impossible to execute. The paintings have a common theme: each contains a coded reference to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Enter Owen Burns, Edwardian dilettante and amateur sleuth, whose assistance is often sought by Scotland Yard to solve baffling crimes. Burns regards murder as an art form and is dazzled by the creativity of the mysterious killer, whose motive and methods are more baffling with each new murder.

‘The Seven Wonders of Crime’ is the second Burns novel to be published in English on Amazon, following ‘The Lord of Misrule’ in 2010. The author, best-selling French writer Paul Halter, is widely regarded as the successor to John Dickson Carr. His prize-winning novel ‘The Fourth Door, featuring his other series detective Dr. Twist, was published on Amazon earlier in 2011.

In all, Paul Halter has written over 30 novels, almost all ‘locked room,’ or impossible crime. In 2006 his collection of short stories ‘The Night of the Wolf’ appeared, to critical acclaim.

A fourth full-length novel, ‘The Demon of Dartmoor,’ is in preparation. Please contact: pugmire1@yahoo.com