Richard Hernaman Allen

Defenestration And Devilment Richard Hernaman Allen

1967/8. Working on the introduction of Value Added Tax in a building by Holborn Viaduct, Nick Storey is astonished to find that a man's body in an apparent road accident is a colleague and that he apparently fell from a window of the building. The police appear to regard the incident as suicide, but the details and what Nick knows and learns about his colleague don't fit. After examining stuff left in his colleague's room and talking to people who knew him better, he discovers a man who was probably putting up a front of deceit, but was also involved in a secretive group sending each other quotes from Shakespeare and Jacobean playwrights, which seem to have hidden meanings. Getting to what they mean involves sleuthing in darkest Surbiton, a series of interviews with liars, staking out a pub in New Malden and finally a confrontation at St Andrew, Holborn with the murderer, who is both completely unexpected but also entirely explicable."Defenestration and Devilment" is the thirtieth book published in a series of detective stories set mostly in HM Customs & Excise, by Richard Hernaman Allen, a former Commissioner