The Calleshire Chronicles Volume Three: Parting Breath, Some Die Eloquent, and Passing Strange

by Catherine Aird

A set of compelling British whodunits featuring Detective Inspector Sloan—from a CWA Diamond Dagger winner and “most ingenious” author (The New Yorker).   Over the course of twenty-four crime novels set in the fictional County of Calleshire, England, and featuring the sleuthing team of shrewd Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and his less-than-shrewd sidekick, Detective Constable William Crosby, award-winning author Catherine Aird maintained the perfect balance between cozy village mystery and police procedural. These three entertaining crime novels offer “the very best in British mystery” (The New Yorker).  Parting On the campus of the University of Calleshire, a young woman finds a student slumped against a cloister’s column, covered in blood. Before he dies, he manages to breathe the words “twenty-six minutes”—which is all Sloan and Crosby have to go on to solve a case that’s anything but elementary.  Some Die As Sloan learns he is about to become a father, a suspicious death demands his attention. It turns out that a murdered mistress at the Girls’ Grammar School in Berebury was secretly a very wealthy woman. What was an elderly chemistry teacher doing with a small fortune—and who was willing to kill to get it?  Passing When the village spinster, a nurse who also played the organ every Sunday at church, is found strangled behind a fortune-teller’s booth, Calleshire’s greatest detective will need more than a crystal ball to see who killed her.

Genres: Mystery

700 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 4, 2018

About the author

Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, known professionally as Catherine Aird, was an English novelist. She was the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories. Her witty, literate, and deftly plotted novels straddle the "cozy" and "police procedural" genres and are somewhat similar in flavour to those of Martha Grimes, Caroline Graham, M.C. Beaton, Margaret Yorke, and Pauline Bell. Aird was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1981, and is a recipient of the 2015 Cartier Diamond Dagger award.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another collection of three Sloan & Crosby detective stories. I am really enjoying these! Good plots, engaging characters who you feel you know after reading one or two of the stories, and quite entertaining.