"Don't you take on so, Fred. Not but what I didn't tell you no good would come of it. When Uranus is in Virgo-"
In the smoke-grimed West Midlands industrial city of Arkenshaw, a pair of policemen, Sergeant Duckett and Constable Ryder, have been charged with the wrongful arrest for burglary of two Pakistani immigrants, Ghulam Beas and Chakwal Mohamed. Antony Maitland leads the two cops' defense. It does not help the wily barrister's case that Sergeant Duckett openly admits to being a nativist who wants Pakistanis out of his country. As he talks to the widowed Duckett and his daughter and formidable astrology enthusiast mother, Antony realizes that in Arkenshaw the words foreigner and Pakistani are nearly synonymous. Are Beas and Mohamed simply the victims of a racist cop's thuggish machinations, as the prosecution contends, or is there something yet rottener going on in West Riding? When one of the principals in the affair is murdered, it seems there is something very rotten indeed.
This gripping courtroom drama from 1967 features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
Autorentext
Sara Woods, the pen name of Eileen Mary Lana Hutton Bowen Judd, was bornin 1916 in Bradford, Yorkshire. She was the daughter of Francis Burton Hutton, a garage proprietor and Sara Roberta Woods, the daughter of a buyer for an engineering firm.In 1946 she married electrical engineer Anthony George Bowen Judd. Following a dozen years of farming in rural Yorkshire, the couple moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1958, where Sara began her prolific mystery writing career. She became well-known for her detective series featuring canny barrister Antony Maitland - a character inspired by her beloved older brother, Antony Woods Hutton, a promising young solicitor who was tragically killed in 1941 at the age of 33 when as a Royal Air Force pilot in the Second World War his plane was shot down during action in Egypt.Sara Woods' detective novels were celebrated for their intricate plots and the authenticity of their courtroom settings and they garnered a longtime, loyal readership. Sara passed away at the age of 69 on November 6, 1985, leaving behind her a rich legacy of four dozen Antony Maitland mysteries.