Detective Inspector Purbright finds himself on loan to the police in Chalmsbury, a town that neighbors Flaxborough and is very like it in the general licentiousness of its citizenry. It seems that one of them has been blowing up the town’s monuments and all the efforts of the Chalmsbury police force to find the miscreant have been in vain. Also, explosives have gone missing from the Flaxborough civil defense center where, by an odd coincidence, Chief Inspector Hector Larch of the Chalmsbury police force spends his Tuesday nights. Determined not to get in Larch’s way, Purbright takes his time getting to know the locals, but when one of them is killed in the latest explosion, he steps up his investigations. With almost no clues to go on save a few scraps of cobbled together verse, he sorts through the town’s eccentric residents until he finally gets his man. First published in 1960, this is the second of Colin Watson’s witty Flaxborough chronicles.

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