Robert Barnard

Professor Belville-Smith had bored university audiences in England with the same lecture for fifty years. Now he was crossing the Australian continent, doing precisely the same. Never before had the reaction been so extreme however, for shortly after an undistinguished appearance at Drummondale University, the doddering old professor is found brutally murdered.

Attending a reunion at his childhood home in Colchester, novelist Graham Broadbent is astonished to meet a nineteen-year-old girl who claims to be his daughter from a torrid affair years earlier.

Perce Spender, a working-class Londoner, is unexpectedly transformed into the twelfth Earl of Ellesmere when a distant relative dies. But he would rather be warming a bar stool in his local pub, and he's taken up residence at Chetton Hall only until arrangements can be made to sell it. Getting rid of the family estate displeases at least one of Perce's greedy offspring, however, and on the morning after a family party, the new Earl is found dead.

Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. Could such a sensitive, noble face belong to a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother's children to make his crown secure? Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England's throne? Grant determines to find out...