
Jacket illustration by Paul Fox
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As head of the Criminal Studies department
at the University of Wessex, Doctor Tudor Cornwall has murder on his
mind. One violent death that has always bothered him is the
killing of Alec D'Urberville in the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of
the Durbervilles.
He therefore decides to rewrite Hardy's account in the style of his
contemporary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, This task is complicated by a
real-life contemporary murder that bears some uncanny resemblances
to the nineteenth century fiction. With the help of his
brilliant young postgraduate favourite, Elizabeth Burney, Doctor
Cornwall sets about unravelling these two parallel mysteries.
Tim Heald is a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. He is the editor of several anthologies
and the Folio Society's four-volume selection of all-time great
crime stories. All three of the Doctor Tudor Cornwall mysteries, Death
and the Visiting Fellow (2004), Death and the
D'Urbervilles (2005), and A Death on the Ocean Wave (2007), are published by
Robert Hale.
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