This Parody of Death

An entertaining tale of the unexplained death of a local miser, featuring a bookseller with a nose for investigation and an eye for the ladies. More twists and turns along the way than a dog has fleas, until the full story, reaching back many years, is at last made plain.

Ashmole Foxe has encountered some odd people in his time, but few as strange and forbidding as this miserly, reclusive undertaker, whose murder he has been asked to investigate. All the man cared about was the arcane art of change-ringing on church bells, so it was somehow fitting his body should be found in the tower of St. Peter Mancroft church in the centre of Norwich. Yet how he died and why his body ended up there there are anything but clear.

Nor do the oddities cease there. The dead man’s father was once a famous artist and wood-carver â€" until his son imprisoned him in his own house. What do the carvings he left on so many of the wooden panels there mean? Why does the housekeeper keep coming up with different tales to account for her own part in the family history? Why are nearly all the rooms in the house kept locked? And why was the house burgled on the night its master was murdered, when nothing was taken?

It’s going to take all Foxe’s cunning and persistence to sift through a mass of suspects, all displaying plain signs of guilt; discover why nothing in the undertaker’s house or his past is what it seems; and reach beyond the lies and inventions to unravel an amazing tale of selfless love and obsessive greed colliding in a parody of death itself.