The Libertines — Douglas Clark

“two blokes poisoned, one by a chance which is mathematically impossible and the other by a means which is physically impossible. We don't half buy it in this team!”

Each summer there's a modest cricket festival in the small Yorkshire town of Ravendale Bridge. The hosts and challengers, amateurs from many walks of life and many parts of the country, come together for a happy fortnight, and take on all comers.

But this year they have to take on a new adversary: murder. Within a space of three days, two of their oldest supporters -- one as popular as the other is unpopular -- collapse mysteriously. Coronaries? That's the initial opinion, but it is soon revealed that both men died of nicotine poisoning.

Readers of Douglas Clark's earlier successes will not need to be told how fiendishly knowledgeable he is about poisons and their esoteric workings. Here the action of the poison presents our old friends from Scotland Yard -- that brilliant team, Superintendent Masters and Inspector Green -- with a particularly baffling puzzle.

And for cricket lovers there's the added bonus of some tensely exciting matches -- one of which provides a subtle clue to the solution.

Douglas Clark was born in Lincolnshire, 1919. He wrote over 20 crime novels and under other names, including James Ditton and Peter Hosier.