Mary Theresa Coolican Kelly

>For someone with nothing better to do on a wet summer evening there is still harmless amusement to be had from an old-fashioned melodramatic opera. But the curtains part on a pale-faced official announcing that the diva is unwell, the performance must be abandoned. The audience rise to leave, stunned and grumbling. They have missed the show - they don't know by how much. For the soprano's illness is only one scene of drama that has embraced kidnapping, drug running, and death - and the climax is still to be reached, round the corner from the opera house among the vegetable sacks of Covent Garden.

>Staffordshire in the 1950s. Within the clay tanks at the pottery company Shentall's, a body has been found. Amid cries of industrial espionage and sabotage of this leader of the pottery industry, there is a case of bitter murder to solve for Inspector Hedley Nicholson. Kelly's mystery won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1961 for its impeccable sense of place and detail, and for the emotional weight of its central crime. The novel is part of a shift from the cosiness of earlier crime novels to mysteries characterised by their psychological interest and affecting realism. An influential classic.

In a dingy one-room apartment in London, old Princess Karukhina lies dead amid the squalor in which she lived. She had fled from Russia in the days of the Revolution, and had lived in obscurity and poverty with the one member of her family who remained alive, her grandson, Ivan. Now death brings her to the attention of Inspector Nightingale and Sergeant Beddoes of Scotland Yard. Very soon the Inspector begins to realize that the Princess did not die of natural causes. Her grandson is unaccountably missing, and the trunkful of magnificent jewels that she kept under her bed is empty. As Inspector Nightingale pursues his investigation he uncovers theft, double-dealing, and murder - and the tradition that contributed to the dignity of a royal family.

>A car speeds down a road between miles of marshes and estuary flats, its passenger a young woman named Agnes, fresh from a discovery that has turned her world turned upside down. Meanwhile, the news of a body found on the marsh is spreading round the local area, panic following in its wake. >A masterpiece of suspense, Mary Kelly’s 1962 novel follows Agnes as she casts her mind back through the past few days to find the links between her husband, his friends, a mysterious stranger new to the village and a case of unexplained death. >Gripping, intelligent and affecting, Due to a Death was nominated for the Gold Dagger Award and showcases the author’s versatility and willingness to push the boundaries of the mystery genre.