Mild-mannered Arnold Landon tries to go about his job quietly and expertly, but he’s a proverbial magnet for trouble. He works for the Morpeth Department of Antiquities and Museums in Northumberland. How can he keep finding himself unintentionally involved in murders and crimes?
And now he has something new to contend with. The county government had been restructured, with departments combined and positions shuffled. His own has a new deputy head, a strikingly beautiful young woman who is as ruthless and political as she is beautiful. She lets Arnold know in no uncertain terms where he stands and that she’ll be looking for any missteps he makes. She assigns him an assistant, one reassigned during the reorganization and a man she doesn’t like at all.
Arnold sits in on a public meeting about a Viking trust, strictly to observe. Different parties start arguing with each other, and the stand-off is only resolved when Arnold is named chair of a fact-finding task force. He’s still bewildered at how it all happened, but he takes his role seriously. As does a reporter investigating the trust, its trustees, and what look like related business shenanigans. When the reporter is found murdered, Arnold realizes he has inadvertently walked into yet another crime, much to his new boss’s displeasure.
Roy Lewis
Murder at the Folly is the tenth Arnold Landon mystery by British writer Roy Lewis. I don’t know how he pulls it off, but each entry in the series is better than its already excellent predecessor. Lewis has a knack for smoothly inserting historical information into these stories, so that it’s almost like getting two narratives. In this one, we read about Viking lore, and how a small, almost insignificant site is actually an entry way into a royal boat burial.
And once again, it is mild-mannered Arnold Landon, amateur expert on medieval stone and wood and the builders who used them, will provide the key to solving the murder.
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.
Related:
Murder Under the Bridge by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the Tower by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the Church by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the Barn by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the Manor by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the Farmhouse by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the Stableyard by Roy Lewis.
Murder in the House by Roy Lewis.
Murder by the Quay by Roy Lewis.
Error in Judgment by Roy Lewis.
Some Thursday Readings
The Flitcrafting of Sam Spade – Nathan Ward at CrimeReads.
Remembering an Agatha Christmas – William Norton at The Critic Magazine.
Agatha Christie’s Final Mystery – Kemper Donovan at CrimeReads.
Wildcat: The Frenzied Prayer of Flannery O’Connor – David Griffith at Church Life Journal.
Bookish Diversion: In the Market – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
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