Stately Homicide

Bullen Hall is the ideal English stately home, its rose-red brick, sweeping lawns, and encircling moat serene under the summer sun. Detective-Inspector Ben Jurnet has not inkling of impending tragedy as he attends a party there to celebrate the retirement of the Hall's curator and the arrival of his handsome, self-assured successor.

The dreadful, mutilated corpse that is dragged from the moat the next morning brutally shatters the idyllic picture and disrupts the peaceful existence of those who live and work on the lovely estate. Jurnet has met them all, the murder victim included, but his task is no easier for that. Exquisite, imperious Elena Appleyard, owner of the Hall and sister of the late Lazlo Appleyard---Appleyard of Hungary, the renowned hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising---simply wnat the murder solved with the minimum of disturbance to the existing order. Steve Appleyard, the deceased hero's young son, is absorbed by his love the the beautiful Jessica. The outgoing curator, Francis Coryton, is obsessed with his discovery of some sensational love letters written by Anne Boleyn to her brother George, the first owner of the Hall, while Ferenc Szanto, a Hungarian refugee, is concerned only that the unvarnished truth about Appleyard of Hungary should at last be published.

Patiently disentangling the threads of love and hate, Jurnet searches for means and motive. But dark legacies from the past overshadow the sun-drenched present, old passions destroy new loves, and further tragedy engulfs Bullen Hall before Jurnet wins through to the truth.

This is #3 in A Benjamin Jurnet Mystery.