"Super, swift-sure characterisation, pace...Paula Gosling has all the gifts" SUNDAY TIMES "Ingenious plotting...and a slam-bang solution." LITERARY REVIEW It's election time in Blackwater Bay - but there's a dead man in Cotter's Cut who won't be casting his vote this year. Sheriff Matt Gabriel is faced with a murder without apparent motive. Circumstantial evidence leads him to arrest Frog Bartlett, but he's not happy about it. Frog Bartlett has a nasty temper, it's true. But at least one person believes he is innocent - and has enough money to anonymously finance a strong defence. The election hots up, tempers become frayed, a small riot occurs - and then somebody else is killed. Suddenly, Matt Gabriel himself is a suspect...
Paula Gosling is a US born crime writer. She has lived in the UK since the 1960s. Gosling started her writing career as a copy-writer and published her first novel, A Running Duck, in 1974. This won the John Creasey Award for the best first novel of the year and she has also received both the Gold Dagger for Monkey Puzzle in 1985. She is a past Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association.
Her novel A Running Duck, written in 1974 (also published as Fair Game), has been adapted twice into films, once as a Sylvester Stallone vehicle - Cobra and the second time as a film with Cindy Crawford entitled Fair Game.