A Grave Coffin - Hardcover

Butler, Gwendoline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002326388 ISBN 13: 9780002326384

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1998

Synopsis

‘Gwendoline Butler is excellent on the bizarre fantasies of other people’s lives and on modern paranoia overlaying old secrets; and her plots have the rare ability to shock’ Andrew Taylor, Independent

The discovery of the mutilated body of Harry Seton shouldn’t have concerned John Coffin, Commander of London’s Second City. But the victim, a detective doing undercover work on the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals, had left a note amongst his papers: ‘ Ask Coffin’. What he meant by this no one seems to know, including his superior, but it appears that Seton had been secretly investigating internal corruption just before his brutal murder. Coffin, acting on private instructions from above, directly involves himself in following up on Seton’s work only to find that someone is ahead of the game, muddying tracks and destroying evidence.

But the Second City is bracing itself for a far greater tragedy. Four boys, each connected to the police in some way, have gone missing, and just as Coffin starts off in Seton’s footsteps a child’s body turns up – buried in a shallow grave in common land. That the children have been specifically targeted by someone with a grudge against the police seems obvious; that the perpetrator is deranged is now clear. The only witnesses to the abductions are a gang of roller-bladers, but fear and something else is keeping them quiet.

The Second City is gripped by the horror of these events, and horror too comes stalking directly to Coffin’s door, threatening both him and Stella. But is it Harry Seton’s nemesis who is seeking out Coffin, or the child-killer still out there in the night?

About this title

Review:

‘Her [Gwendoline Butler’s] inventiveness never seems to flag; and the singular atmosphere of her books, compounded of jauntiness and menace, remains undiminished’
TLS

‘Butler distils her own brand of disquiet: omnipresent and irresistible’
Sunday Times

‘Gwendoline Butler writes detective novels that both in method and atmosphere are things apart... she achieves that real whodunit pull’
The Times

From the Back Cover:

As John Coffin, Commander of London’s Second City, is investigating the sale if illegal pharmaceuticals, tragedy strikes on his own patch; the body of a child is found buried in a shallow grave, and three other boys are also missing. Atmospheric and brooding, Gwendoline Butler’s latest novel is a tense tale of betrayal and perversion.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0002326388
• ISBN 13: 9780002326384
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256