Suicide Intended — David Williams

The fifth in David Williams's popular series featuring Chief Inspector Merlin Parry: a teasing whodunit, with all Williams's hallmarks -- stylish writing, wit and a totally unexpected solution. Freddy Gibbon was a blackmailer, drug peddler, thief and bully. An accomplished juvenile crook, in the sense that he had never been caught, he looked forward to a widening and profitable career in the blacker arts while still an eighteen-year-old schoolboy studying for A levels -- albeit without the least desire to gain any: but there was a dark reason for that too. So when Freddy's naked body is discovered in the snow-covered basement area of Modlen College, a private sixth form crammer in the country near Cardiff, there is more secret joy than open sorrow amongst the group of pupils, teachers and servants who have reason to be relieved at his passing. But deciding which of their number might have brought that passing about is the question eventually presented to Chief Inspector Merlin Parry and Sergeant Gomer Lloyd. Because what first looked like suicide is adjudged by the pathologist to have been a well-organized murder.