The Timberdick Mysteries are a series of murder stories set in the sleazy back-streets of a south coast seaport in post-war Britain. The amateur detective is a call-girl who solves the mysteries by listening carefully to what people say. “I got there by thinking, not by fingerprints,” she tells her policeman friend in the first novel. The Case of the Naughty Wife is the latest Timberdick mystery, eagerly awaited by readersCan Glenn Miller’s lost trombone be the key to Timberdick’s latest murder mystery? When the Hoboken Arms burns down, the butchered body of a wayward husband is found in the yard. The next morning, Timberdick has to cope with a dead Admiral on her front room carpet. The Chief Constable’s wife blames an escaped convict but Timberdick’s not so sure. She knows that her favourite policeman, Glenn Miller’s mysterious trombone and the Chief Constable’s wife were in a country pub in January 1945. Now, in 1966, they’re together again.Timbers is sure that the trombone will lead to the murderer, but her every step forward is thwarted by thunder and lightning and wives who won’t behave!

Greek scholars have produced a vast body of evidence bearing on nuptial practices that has yet to be mined by a professional economist. By standing on their shoulders, the author proposes and tests radically new interpretations of three important status groups in Greek history: the pallakē, the nothos, and the hetaira. It is argued that legitimate marriage – marriage by loan of the bride to the groom – was not the only form of legal marriage in classical Athens and the ancient Greek world generally. Pallakia – marriage by sale of the bride to the groom – was also legally recognized. The pallakē-wifeship transaction is a sale into slavery with a restrictive covenant mandating the employment of the sold woman as a wife. In this highly original and challenging new book, economist Morris Silver proposes and tests the hypothesis that the likelihood of bride sale rises with increases in the distance between the ancestral residence of the groom and the father’s household. Nothoi, the bastard children of pallakai, lacked the legal right to inherit from their fathers but were routinely eligible for Athenian citizenship. It is argued that the basic social meaning of hetaira (companion) is not ‘prostitute’ or ’courtesan,’ but ‘single woman’ – a woman legally recognized as being under her own authority (kuria). The defensive adaptation of single women is reflected in Greek myth and social practice by their grouping into packs, most famously the Daniads and Amazons.