Malice Aforethought

In the little hamlet of Wyvern’s Cross, where good manners, tennis and tea are pivotal to the functioning of society, little Dr Bickleigh has a rather large problem: he needs to erase his insufferable wife. His meetings with Ivy are becoming tiresome, and although his burning passion for Gwynyfryd Rattery does not play out as imagined in the toolshed, there is now the infinitely superior Madeleine Cranmere to be worshipped… Resourceful but impulsive, Dr Bickleigh is consumed with the image of his goal. Wickedly funny and playfully frank, this is the best-known novel of Anthony Berkeley (aka Francis Iles), one of crime fiction’s greatest innovators. With David Timson doing the telling, it has never been better.