Money in the Morgue

Roderick Alleyn is back in this unique crime novel begun by Ngaio Marsh during the Second World War and now completed by Stella Duffy. Mr Glossop is on his regular run delivering wages to the hospitals scattered across New Zealand's Canterbury plains. When his car breaks down, he is forced to stay the night at Mount Seager Hospital, twenty miles from the nearest town, where soldiers recovering from scarlet fever are giving the nursing staff a hard time. When Mr Glossop's payroll disappears from a locked safe and the hospital's death toll starts to rise faster than normal, can the appearance of an English detective working in counterespionage be just a lucky coincidence or an indication that something more sinister is afoot? Renowned with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham as one of the four Golden Age `Crime Queens', Ngaio Marsh published 32 novels featuring Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn between 1934 and her death in 1982. In 1945 she put aside a new book, Money in the Morgue, after writing just the opening chapters. Stella Duffy's masterful completion of this unfinished novel celebrates both the style and substance of Dame Ngaio's accomplished storytelling and will delight both fans of the Alleyn Mysteries and new readers who through this book are about to discover them for the first time...