The Wages of Desire: A World War II Mystery

by Stephen Kelly

Overview

In the late summer of 1941, as the war deepens, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb must risk his life to sort out the links between a series of killings—past and present—in a Hampshire village brimming with buried secrets.

In the late summer of 1941, as the war in Europe drags on, long-buried secrets begin to surface in the Hampshire village of Winstead, when the body of a young woman—a former conscientious objector—is found shot to death in the church cemetery. The woman’s only connection to Winstead seems to be that she lately had joined a group of conscripted workers who are building a prisoner of war camp on an abandoned farm near the village. But Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb, who is called in to solve the case, has his doubts.

The mystery deepens when workers at the farm find the remains of a child in the foundation of the old farmhouse, and a tramp who had been squatting in the wood near the church turns up dead. Lamb soon begins to suspect that the crimes might be related to a tragic event that occurred in Winstead more than twenty years earlier—the suicide of a village woman who took her life in despair after her husband abandoned her and took their young twin sons with him. As Lamb pieces together the connections between the crimes, he draws closer to the source of evil in Winstead’s past and present and, in the end, must risk his own life to uncover the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681771908
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	08/09/2016
Series:	Inspector Lamb Series , #2
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Stephen Kelly is an award-winning writer, reporter, editor and newspaper columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, and Baltimore Magazine. He has a Master of Arts degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and has taught writing and journalism at Hopkins, Towson University, in Baltimore, and Sweet Briar College, in Virginia. He lives in Columbia, Maryland.
Stephen Kelly is an award-winning writer, reporter, editor and newspaper columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and Baltimore Magazine. He has a Master of Arts degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and has taught writing and journalism at Hopkins, Towson University, in Baltimore, and Sweet Briar College, in Virginia. He lives in Columbia, Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

Don't we all occasionally long for an old-fashioned country mystery with a tricky plot and an eccentric cast of characters? Stephen Kelly's The Wages of Desire…doesn't quite ring all those bells, but it'll do.

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

★ 06/20/2016
Set in 1942, Kelly’s pleasantly baffling second whodunit featuring Det. Chief Insp. Thomas Lamb of the Hampshire Constabulary fulfills the promise of 2015’s The Language of the Dead. When the Rev. Gerald Wimberly finds a corpse in the cemetery adjoining his church in the village of Winstead, he alerts the police. The victim is identified as conscientious objector Ruth Aisquith, a member of the Women’s Land Army. She was shot in the back and left facedown next to a grave. After Lamb interviews the oily Wimberly and his wife, Wilhemina, who are both less than forthcoming about what happened, he quickly gets a sense that solving the murder will be tricky. When a man working on the site of a new POW camp unearths a skull, the case takes a different turn, raising speculation that Aisquith’s death is related to an older crime. Fans of the TV series Foyle’s War, which similarly addresses the role of the police during WWII, will be pleased. Agent: Joelle Delbourgo, Joelle Delbourgo Associates. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Don't we all occasionally long for an old-fashioned country mystery with a tricky plot and an eccentric cast of characters?"

New York Times Book Review

"The Wages of Desire is historical mystery at its very best, well-researched, well-written and well worth reading!" to Reader Reviews

"Some of the most precise, most thorough, scene descriptions I’ve ever read. An entertaining World War II mystery that packs a punch all the way through until the very final word, literally."

Bookgasm

"The war is more matter of fact than oppressive presence in this second Lamb mystery, as decades-old secrets are wrapped up in a satisfying conclusion."

Booklist

"The Wages of Desire is historical mystery at its very best, well-researched, well-written and well worth reading!"

Reader to Reader Reviews

"The war is more matter of fact than oppressive presence in this second Lamb mystery, as decades-old secrets are wrapped up in a satisfying conclusion."

Booklist

2016-05-30
This second round of crime and detection in a homefront English village for DCI Thomas Lamb and a crew that now includes his daughter is mostly retro but with some disconcerting additions.Though the German warplanes they've learned to fear haven't menaced the villagers of Winstead recently, the nation is still very much at war. The greater part of the Tigue family's farm has been chosen as the site of a prison for Italian POWs, and building continues apace. In the midst of these consequential preparations, no one expects Ruth Aisquith, one of the cooks on the building site, to turn up dead in the cemetery of St. Michael's church with 50 pounds in her purse and a bullet hole in her back. Far from introducing violence to Winstead, however, the murder merely uncovers incongruous passions that have long seethed beneath the surface. Lawrence Tigue, the head of the parish civic council, has been hiding a dark secret for more than 20 years. Rev. Gerald Wimberly, the vicar of St. Stephen's, is about to resume his affair with his domestic, Doris White, under a serious blackmail threat. Albert Clemmons, the Tigue farmhand suspected of molesting the twin sons of suicidal Claire O'Hare a generation ago, has come back home to die. The excavation of three more corpses at the construction site merely adds more fuel to a fire fanned by meddlesome spinster Flora Wheatley and precocious 12-year-old Lilly Martin, both of whom roam the area at night spying on their neighbors. Lamb (The Language of the Dead, 2015), who's given his daughter, Vera, a job as his driver to keep her from being conscripted, can only wonder how long he can shield her from the homefront horrors likely to startle some readers agreeably and turn others away. Kelly adds something perversely novel, and potentially divisive, to the decorous conventions of his golden-age models: abrupt shifts in point of view, sometimes within a single scene, between characters who seem right out of Agatha Christie and those with considerably darker doings on their minds.

Kirkus Reviews