Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Murder in the Field" by Roy Lewis

Arnold Landon has a great opportunity to partially escape the politics of the Morpeth Department of Antiquities & Museums, and he seizes it. He’s seconded (or loaned) to an archaeological dig under scientists from York; they’re excavating a field which contains all kinds of Roman and Celtic artifacts.

He quickly discovers the tensions among the team. Led by his friend Rhea Williams, it includes four students and a professor. The lone woman student seems expert at playing off the men, including the professor, until one night at dinner, and after too much to drink, she ridicules him in front of the team and a guest. Tensions break into open hostilities.

We know where this headed; the woman student is found murdered in a ditch. Detective Inspector Pat Garrett thinks he knows the likely killer. Landon, taking something of a smaller role than he has in previous mysteries, is troubled by something e thinks he should remember. When he does, the story veers in another direction, and more lives are threatened.

Roy Lewis

Murder in the Field is the 12^th Arnold Landon mystery by British author Roy Lewis. Like its predecessors, the reader is treated to not only a good story but also a readable and rather fascinating look into an archaeological dig.

Lewis (1933-2019) was the author of some 60 other mysteries, novels, and short story collections. His Inspector Crow series includes A Lover Too Many, Murder in the Mine, The Woods Murder, Error of Judgment, and Murder for Money, among others. The Eric Ward series, of which The Sedleigh Hall Murder is the first (and originally published as A Certain Blindness in 1981), includes 17 novels. Lewis lived in northern England.