In this thrilling crime novel by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, a student’s last words are all that Detective C. D. Sloan has to go on in his latest case There are rumblings throughout the campus of the University of Calleshire, talk of a sit-in, of revolt, of H? Chí Minh, of discontent. Malcolm Humbert has been expelled, and the students are livid. Meanwhile, the faculty is equally out of sorts—Hilda Linaker just wants to finish her treatise on Jane Austen, Bernard Watkinson is tired of dealing with the female students’ vehement—and possibly dangerous—opinions, and Simon Mautby can’t find a lab tech to help with his ecology experiments. When someone breaks into a dorm room, leaving behind little evidence but a single kernel of corn, it’s time to call in the police. But no one—not the professors, the students, or even the great detective C. D. Sloan—could have predicted murder. A young woman finds a second-year student slumped against a cloister’s column, covered in blood. Before he dies, he manages to breathe the words “twenty-six minutes.” The brilliant and acerbic inspector C. D. Sloan, recently reunited with his assistant, Detective Constable Crosby, must connect a seemingly unrelated burglary to a senseless murder—with nothing more to go on than those eerie last words.

A set of compelling British whodunits featuring Detective Inspector Sloan—from a CWA Diamond Dagger winner and “most ingenious” author (The New Yorker). Over the course of twenty-four crime novels set in the fictional County of Calleshire, England, and featuring the sleuthing team of shrewd Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and his less-than-shrewd sidekick, Detective Constable William Crosby, award-winning author Catherine Aird maintained the perfect balance between cozy village mystery and police procedural. These three entertaining crime novels offer “the very best in British mystery” (The New Yorker). Parting Breath: On the campus of the University of Calleshire, a young woman finds a student slumped against a cloister’s column, covered in blood. Before he dies, he manages to breathe the words “twenty-six minutes”—which is all Sloan and Crosby have to go on to solve a case that’s anything but elementary. Some Die Eloquent: As Sloan learns he is about to become a father, a suspicious death demands his attention. It turns out that a murdered mistress at the Girls’ Grammar School in Berebury was secretly a very wealthy woman. What was an elderly chemistry teacher doing with a small fortune—and who was willing to kill to get it? Passing Strange: When the village spinster, a nurse who also played the organ every Sunday at church, is found strangled behind a fortune-teller’s booth, Calleshire’s greatest detective will need more than a crystal ball to see who killed her.

This work is the only comprehensive guide to sequels in English, with over 84,000 works by 12,500 authors in 17,000 sequences.

A guide to series fiction lists popular series, identifies novels by character, and offers guidance on the order in which to read unnumbered series.