Vali Noir And The Hunt Ball Poisoner (eBook)

One dead lord. One dirty county. No clean exits.

The fifty-third Amersham Hunt Ball is forty minutes old when Lord Pemberton Ashcroft-Hale hits the parquet with his face locked in the grimace of strychnine poisoning.

Two hundred witnesses. A string quartet. And before the ambulance has reached the drive, his widow is in the car park with a chequebook.

Private investigator Vali Noir takes the hire. She's ex-Metropolitan Police ? resigned rather than buried ? operating out of two rooms above a butcher's shop in Chesham, Chilterns, November 1973.

Her partner is CJ, a standard poodle trained by the Met's dog unit and retired with a torn ligament at three years old. The nose still works.

What looks like a murder of motive ? a despised lord, an estate full of resentment, a tenant farmer who made the mistake of saying what everyone thought ? runs considerably deeper than the chalk hills it's buried under.

Vali follows the money through shell companies, planning committees, and a locked desk drawer until she's no longer working a murder case. She's pulled the edge of something much darker that has been running through the Chilterns for twenty years. Something that now has her beloved CJ in it's sights.

The case closes. The other case does not.

Book One of the Vali Noir Investigates series. For readers of Sara Paretsky, Maisie Dobbs, and Elizabeth George.