Deadly Inheritance (eBook)

Charlotte Vassell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
368 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
9780571390458 (ISBN)

Infos

'One of the most exciting new voices in crime fiction.' ERIN KELLY ** Available for pre-order now ** Two murders. Rosie wakes up at 3am already feeling the twinges of a brutal hangover - an afternoon spent day drinking with her uni pals has left her rather the worse for wear. She creeps downstairs for a glass of water - only to stumble onto a shocking, bloody scene in the kitchen. One will. It looks like a botched burglary has left both Rosie's grandmother and her attacker dead. But then Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp gets a tip about the matriarch's last will. It turns out, this well-heeled family has a nefarious past. A family full of secrets. With his reputation on the line and powerful people pressuring him to close the case, Caius must decide what's more dangerous: the body on the floor or the skeletons in the closet? 'A fresh, bitingly witty take on the whodunnit.' RED, ON THE OTHER HALF 'A total joy to read.' HARRIET TYCE, ON THE IN CROWD WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ????? These books hold every single thing a reader could want. Thriller? Check. Mystery that keeps you wondering? Plenty. Characters that you want to know and see some of your friends in? Sure. ????? If you like mystery/thrillers which are just a bit different, are quirky and with plenty of good humour then check out Charlotte Vassel's Caius Beauchamp series. ????? I absolutely love Charlotte Vassell's writing style, it completely meshes with what I want in a book, quirky, entertaining, a bit gossipy (quite a bit gossipy if I'm being honest) and some characters that you really root for.

Charlotte Vassell studied History at the University of Liverpool and completed a Masters in Art History at SOAS, University of London, before training as an actor at Drama Studio London. Other than treading the boards Charlotte has also worked in advertising, executive search, and as a purveyor of silk top hats.

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'One of the most exciting new voices in crime fiction.' ERIN KELLYTwo murders. Rosie wakes up at 3am already feeling the twinges of a brutal hangover - an afternoon spent day drinking with her uni pals has left her rather the worse for wear. She creeps downstairs for a glass of water - only to stumble onto a shocking, bloody scene in the kitchen. One will. It looks like a botched burglary has left both Rosie's grandmother and her attacker dead. But then Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp gets a tip about the matriarch's last will. It turns out, this well-heeled family has a nefarious past. A family full of secrets. With his reputation on the line and powerful people pressuring him to close the case, Caius must decide what's more dangerous: the body on the floor or the skeletons in the closet?'A fresh, bitingly witty take on the whodunnit.' RED, ON THE OTHER HALF'A total joy to read.' HARRIET TYCE, ON THE IN CROWDWHAT READERS ARE SAYING????? These books hold every single thing a reader could want. Thriller? Check. Mystery that keeps you wondering? Plenty. Characters that you want to know and see some of your friends in? Sure. ????? If you like mystery/thrillers which are just a bit different, are quirky and with plenty of good humour then check out Charlotte Vassel's Caius Beauchamp series. ????? I absolutely love Charlotte Vassell's writing style, it completely meshes with what I want in a book, quirky, entertaining, a bit gossipy (quite a bit gossipy if I'm being honest) and some characters that you really root for. **A FATAL LEGACY, the next bitingly funny mystery from Charlotte Vassell is now available to pre-order!**

Textauszug

1

A Train Carriage

The train billowed steam as it pulled out of Victoria station chuff-chuff-chuffing like a wheezing, ancient and over-pampered lapdog as it went, although by the time it neared Chelsea Bridge it had started to gain a more respectable speed. The train carriage was art deco. The seats, upholstered in a green and mustard chevron-patterned velvet, were like grand armchairs, softly swelling and curling around the passengers who sat in them. A world away from the threadbare moquette and suspiciously sticky plastic horrors of modern public transport. The carpet was a swirling sea of deep emerald – as the train rocked and picked up more speed, the floor looked like seaweed swaying with the tide – and the brocade curtains were an even more bottomless shade of verdancy than the floor. The walls were clad in walnut marquetry – mostly geometric shapes – but above the fine head of a lovely woman, who had been staring out of the window wondering if she’d worn the right pair of shoes, was an intricate scene of an ancient castle perched on a cliff edge.

Calliope Foster, or Callie as she was known to her friends, peered down at her brown leather boots. They were positively Victorian. Tightly laced – constricting almost. The balls of her feet were itching with mild pain and threatening to swell. She wondered if she could take them off discreetly. Their table was covered in a crisp white cloth, so no one would see. No one would be scandalised at the hole on the heel in her left sock that needed darning – it was her last clean pair. If only they hadn’t had to run up that escalator. She hadn’t planned on doing a hundred-metre dash out of the tube in a pair of boots with four-inch heels that pinched at the best of times. A white-jacketed steward silently appeared at her lover – or rather ‘boyfriend’ in the less romantic colloquial – Caius’s elbow, his presence greeted with politely silent and crease-eye smiles from both passengers, who then duly ignored him as he began laying out all the necessary accoutrements in front of them before pouring them each a cup of English breakfast tea.

Callie looked about the carriage at the three sets of other guests seated at their own tables. At the other end was a middle-aged couple: she was wearing a blue-and-white floral dress – acceptable but very provincial, rather golf-clubby – and he his best tweed jacket. It looked new and, therefore, wrong. A thirtieth-anniversary trip, paid for by the children, was Callie’s guess. Next to them was a party Callie could only describe as chronically nostalgic – and that was saying something for a woman in a broad-brimmed felt hat and Victorian-style boots. The group was composed of two young women and a young man. One woman wore a mangy fox-fur stole and the other had victory rolls so crisp that Callie could almost smell the hairspray from the other end of the carriage. The young man wore heavy woollen pleated trousers held up by a pair of bright red braces. He had been wearing a mass-provided but convincing Fair Isle tank top, but the carriage had proven to be too warm for his faux-antiquated constitution and he had removed it. Callie could see that his shirt had a detachable collar, such was his dedication. He’d rolled his sleeves up and was silently filming the two women from across the table as they pulled poses while they drank their tea. She could understand this wholesale aping of the past, to an extent. No one really dressed up any more. Nothing felt special in ill-fitting, unlined polyester, but this felt like a cross between a costume and something psychologically diagnosable. She wondered if they were the sort to forgo the convenience of a modern refrigerator for the sake of their aesthetics. The girl with the fox fur looked up at her and Callie gave her a quick tactfully dismissive smile before looking away. Beside Callie and Caius’s table was an elderly lady and her granddaughter. They sat in companionable silence. They both looked suitably remote, with a comfortable, detached ease. They were used to this sort of thing; totally unfazed by it all. Callie saw the granddaughter look up at her grandmother and give her a small smile. The grandmother returned it with a gentle pat on the girl’s hand. Callie strained to listen.

‘You’ll find someone,’ the grandmother said.

‘Perhaps.’ She laughed despite a flash of sadness behind her eyes. The granddaughter had been checking her phone a lot, but Callie saw her turn it off theatrically and put it away with a proud flourish. She took some knitting out of her bag and resumed working on what seemed to Callie to be a baby hat. Now that she was really looking, Callie could see that the grand-mother was quite grand, in a respectably understated way. She had that sort of smartness, and yet was somehow also a little dishevelled, which usually suggested family money.

Caius and Callie both took a sip of their tea – a house blend created for that specific train. Callie turned to him and said, ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Nostalgia,’ Caius replied, knowingly glancing over his shoulder at the three poseurs who had finally stopped filming and were instead busy inspecting the tableware. The girl in fox fur was peering at the underside of her saucer and could be heard by the whole carriage exclaiming: ‘Oh, it is Worcester! You have such a good eye for china patterns. Do you think I should start collecting it?’

Callie squeezed Caius’s hand. ‘You look very handsome today. I don’t think I’ve told you yet.’

‘Handsome?’ he asked, fishing for an even greater compliment.

‘Yes, handsome. You know, dashing, debonaire and so on.’ She had been the one to buy his rich olive-green merino jumper, but she couldn’t take responsibility for the way he held himself in it.

‘Do you mean fuckable?’ Caius asked, quietly enough to uphold the sense of decorum that the carriage demanded.

‘If you insist.’ A flicker of amusement crossed her mouth and she smiled into her teacup. Their relationship was still new enough for this sort of nonsense to be commonplace.

‘I’d say that you looked handsome too, in both senses of course, but is that a word that can be applied to a woman?’

‘I’d rather be handsome than beautiful. You can’t turn on the TV without being told by a deodorant company that you’re Venus incarnate – but how many women would you call truly handsome?’ Callie thought that beauty was fleeting but handsomeness was more about bearing, taste and sense of self. Exactly the type of confidence that Callie could never be accused of lacking.

‘Do you want me to take a picture of you?’ Caius asked. He wanted to remember how she looked in that dress until he stopped breathing, but he also thought she might want one for obligation’s sake.

‘Oh God.’ Callie sighed. ‘Yeah, probably. I bloody hate social media, but I guess this trip is “on brand”. It annoys me so much that I have to do this rubbish.’

‘Well, to send to um …’

‘My “father”? Hmm …’

‘Yes. You know, to show him that you had a nice time. This lovely outing was a present, after all.’

‘Oh, I’ll just send a thank you card in the post.’ Callie was using correspondence etiquette to keep ‘father’ at bay. ‘But I should put one on my stories I guess.’

‘You don’t have to share it publicly.’ Caius was deeply cynical of social media. Privacy felt paramount these days. He had been mentioned in an article in Tatler a couple of months ago which charted his family’s change in fortunes and had yet to live it down at the station. It wasn’t every day that a lower-middle-class mixed-race bloke from Archway finds out he can trace his ancestry back to the Norman Conquest and will one day have to manage a significant country estate with everyone bowing and scraping and calling him Sir Caius. Someone had cut a copy out and sellotaped it to his computer screen. People who were all right with him before looked at him differently now. A sharp elbow to the ribs every time he went to the pub for a birthday or leaving drinks, a joke that he should be buying the whole station a round, everyone doffing imaginary caps at him in the corridor, being referred to as ‘little DI Fauntleroy’. Matt and Amy, his team and to Caius’s mind the only two decent officers in the building, had had the good sense to rip the piss out of him for half an hour and then never mention it again. Caius took the picture anyway. It would be the new screensaver on his phone.

* * *

A decadent brunch of eggs Benedict, buttery pastries and delicate bowls of passionfruit parfait, with a couple of sweet and yet bracingly strong Bellinis on the side had been served as the countryside passed by in a bucolic blur. At 2 p.m., the train finally pulled into Bath Spa station. It had been raining, and the gentle smell of petrichor lingered pleasingly on the platform, but not quite strong enough to disguise the overbearing...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-13: 9780571390458 / 9780571390458