Death and The Visiting Fellow

When Doctor Tudor Cornwall, Reader in Criminal Studies at the University of Wessex, arrives for a semester as Visiting Fellow at his old friend's university down under, he is met with a nasty surprise. Indeed the surprises keep coming and they get nastier as the plot unravels. An exotic cast of suspicious academi includes an ecologically-correct axeman, a professor of wine and the world's leading authority on an esoteric form of Australian hedgehog. Then there is the student body to consider, too.This mystery began as a homage to Michael Innes's Death at the President's Lodgings, written when he too was a visiting academic in Australia, but this sparkling novel is emphatically set in the twenty-first century.

Tim Heald is a journalist and author of mysteries. Born in Dorchester, he studied modern history at Oxford before becoming a reporter, and columnist for the Sunday Times. He began writing novels in the early '70s, introducing Simon Bognor, a defiantly lazy investigator for the British Board of Trade. Heald followed Bognor through nine more novels, including Murder At Moose Jaw (1981) and Business Unusual (1989) before taking a two decade break from the series, which returned with Death In The Opening Chapter (2011).
Heald has also distinguished himself as a biographer, writing official biographies of sporting heroes like cricket legends Denis Compton and Brian Johnston among others.