Publisher's Synopsis
The first three charming, witty, and joyfully quirky novels in New York Times bestselling author Lynne Truss's Constable Twitten Mysteries.
A Shot in the Dark:
In 1957, Inspector Steine rather enjoys his life as a policeman in the seaside British town of Brighton. As far as he's concerned, the town has no criminals, which means no crime, and no stress. But much to Steine's irritation, there's a new constable in town?the keen and clever Constable Twitten, who sees patterns in small, meaningless burglaries and insists on the strange notion that perhaps all the crime has not been cleared out quite as effectively as Steine thinks.
Worse yet, some of Constable Twitten's ideas could be correct: when renowned theater critic A. S. Crystal arrives in Brighton to tell the detective the secret he knows about the still-unsolved Aldersgate Stick-Up Case of 1945, he's shot dead in his seat.
The Man That Got Away:
Just weeks after the startling events of A Shot In the Dark, in the beach town of Brighton, music is playing and guests are sunning themselves, when a young man is found dead, dripping blood, in a deck chair.
Constable Twitten of the Brighton Police Force has a hunch that the fiendish murder may be connected to a notorious nightspot, but his captain and his colleagues are?as ever?busy with other more important issues. Inspector Steine is being conned into paying for the honor of being featured at the Museum of Wax, and Sergeant Brunswick is trying (and failing) to get the attention of the distraught Brighton Belles who found the body. As the case twists and turns, Constable Twitten must find the murderer and convince his colleagues that there's an evil mastermind behind Brighton's climbing crime rate.
Murder by Milk Bottle
In the wake of two extremely high-profile murder cases, and with the summer of 1957 finally winding down, Constable Twitten is eagerly anticipating a quiet spell at work. But his hoped-for rest is interrupted when he and his colleagues find a trio of bodies, all murdered with the same unusual weapon: a milk bottle.
The three victims are seemingly unconnected-a hardworking patrolman, a would-be beauty queen, and a catty BBC radio personality-so Constable Twitten, Sergeant Brunswick, and Inspector Steine are baffled. But with Brighton on high alert and the local newspaper churning out stories of a killer on the loose, the police trio is determined to solve the case and catch the killer.