Dream spires. A missing academic. A brutal murder?Denton's latest case of a missing fellow takes him to Oxford. But he quickly realises all is not as it seems in the city of dreaming spires. Delving into the tightly knit and intensely jealous world of academia, Denton discovers a fierce rivalry at the heart of the university. Could a tragic tale of suicide and a curious archaeological exhibit be the key to cracking this fiendishly difficult case?Don't miss the other books in the gripping Denton Mystery Series: 1. The Frightened Man 2. The Bohemian Girl 3. The Second Woman 4. The Haunted Martyr 5. The Backward Boy 6. The Past Master 7. The Oxford FellowIf you're looking for a gripping historical crime series look no further than the Denton Murder Mysteries. Perfect for fans of M.C. Beaton's Edwardian Murder Mysteries and Oscar de Muriel's Frey & McGray series.
Denton and Henry James, though they had met on a number of occasions on the London literary scene, would seem to have little in common either as men or writers. But when a Florentine box is stolen from James's house, it is Denton he calls on to retrieve it - perhaps relying on the fact that, unlike the police, Denton combines the ability to unravel difficult puzzles with the sensitivity of a fellow artist. For amongst other things, the box contained three letters whose publication James fears will ruin his reputation.
As Denton tries to discover the mystery of the box's contents and who might have stolen them, the trail leads him to Paris, and a bizarre family of aristocrats, to Italy, where it appears someone is offering money to have Denton killed, and back to London where a deadly shoot-out with a violent gang of East European anarchists pre-figures the Siege of Sydney Street. But eventually it is in the apparently genteel confines of the literary world that the publication of a new novel provides the final clues to a crime of truly Jamesian subtlety.
