Death Rings Twice at Little Aldwyn

Armistice Sunday, 1923. The village of Little Aldwyn has one church, one pub, one telephone, and one woman who hears all of them. Letty Vaughan has run the Little Aldwyn exchange from the back room of the Post Office for four years, and she keeps its books the way other people keep their conscience. So when Edmund Fenn, the parish's most unloved and most careful man, walks in at ten to eight to hold a trunk call from London and asks to be rung back at the pub, she writes the hour down. When a bell rings from the vestry and no one speaks, she logs it as a wrong number. By morning Fenn is dead in the tower gallery with his teacup still warm, and every clock in the village agrees he died at eight. Only Letty knows that the clocks in Little Aldwyn have been agreeing with each other for eleven days, and that the one clock nobody has thought to doubt is her own. Nine names on a memorial brass, one of them scratched out. A forty-eight-drop shortage in a doctor's cupboard. A schoolgirl's pressed foxglove, a missing spoon, a fifteen-year-old with an alibi signed in pencil. A fair-play mystery in which nothing is hidden from the reader and everything is misread - by the parish, by the police, and, once, by Letty herself.