Dead Game — Gerald Hammond

The first book in the Keith Calder series

Keith Calder is an itinerant gunsmith and shooting instructor. He is also a rascal with a total disregard for the law, a skilled and dedicated poacher of birds of both varieties.

Calder is a guest at a shoot in the Scottish Borders when one of the syndicate members dies -- apparently by accident, but a bullet is found in his body.

Calder has a personal interest in the case, which deepens when the brother of his current girlfriend is arrested and charged with the murder. Calder begins to makes his own enquiries but he and Molly find themselves in danger . . .

Praise for Gerald Hammond

‘A gruesome, lightheartedly complex caper in the Scottish lowlands… the whole tangled romp has a what-ho!, outdoorsy energy that's undeniably appealing.' â€" Kirkus Reviews

‘With his expert knowledge of guns and his love of the Scottish countryside, Gerald created marvelous backgrounds against which he set puzzling, credible, and thoroughly entertaining whodunits. His books were not long tedious, padded, thrillers. Instead they are almost of another age, ingenious plots, characters with whom you want to spend time, and a world to which you eagerly anticipate returning.' â€" Paul Bishop, author of Deep Water and A Bucketful of Bullets.

Born in 1926, Gerald Hammond lived in Scotland, where he retired from his profession as an architect in 1982 to pursue his love of shooting and fishing and to write full time. After his first novel, Fred in Situ, was published in 1965, Gerald became a prolific author with over 70 published novels. His last title, The Unkindest Cut, was published in 2012. Most of his novels were published under his own name, but he also wrote under the pseudonyms Arthur Douglas and Dalby Holden.