T Kinsey - A Picture of Murder (A Lady Hardcastle Mystery Book 4)

Despite the way it’s repeatedly used in fiction, tetrodotoxin (pufferfish venom) can’t be used to fake death, it can only be used to kill you. Nevertheless, it persists in stories of voodoo rituals and there is some evidence that Haitian zombie powder contains small amounts of pufferfish venom; it is still suggested that it might account for the stories of people returning from apparent death.

Hamlet the Great Dane’s appearance in the story is by way of being an affectionate nod to the memory of my mother’s cousin Beryl, who died while I was writing the book. She played a strong and loving part in my childhood and I miss her. Almost as much, I miss one of her dogs, a ‘blue’ Great Dane who genuinely did rejoice in the name of Hamlet. He was boisterous, wilful, and clumsy (a congenital defect meant that the inner bones of his forelegs – the radius – grew faster than the outer – the ulna – leaving his front paws splayed out and difficult to control). One of his favourite pastimes was to stand with his wonky front legs on a high retaining wall at the end of the front garden and loom over passers-by, at whom he would joyously bark. He never – to my knowledge, at least – knocked down a small crowd of people, but I’m sure he would have loved to, had he ever had the opportunity.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Dr Peter Walsh for sharing his extensive expert knowledge of turn-of-the-twentieth-century British cinema. I probably owe him at least one more lunch.

I am also inordinately grateful to Jo Webster-Green, whose painstaking cataloguing of Lady Hardcastle’s previous exploits has saved me from making many a mistake with characters and their histories.

And of course, a massive, heartfelt ‘thank you’ to the team at Thomas & Mercer. I’m most especially grateful to my two (count ’em, two) wonderful editors, Jane Snelgrove and Victoria Pepe, without whose professional and personal support during a trying year none of this would have been possible. And I can’t leave out Hatty Stiles, either, because that would just be rude.

About the Author

Photo © 2018 Clifton Photographic Company

T E Kinsey grew up in London and read history at Bristol University. He worked for a number of years as a magazine features writer before falling into the glamorous world of the Internet, where he edited content for a very famous entertainment website for quite a few years more. After helping to raise three children, learning to scuba dive and to play the drums and the mandolin (though never, disappointingly, all at the same time), he decided the time was right to get back to writing. A Picture of Murder is the fourth novel in a series of mysteries starring Lady Hardcastle. There is also a short story, ‘Christmas at The Grange’. His website is at tekinsey.uk and you can follow him on Twitter – @tekinsey – as well as on Facebook: www.facebook.com/tekinsey.