Dead Image

Dead Image, Hale, 2000
The first Best mystery

Paperback edition
Large Print, Ulverscroft, 2001
Audio Book, Soundings, 2001

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To be published by the Mystery Press on 1 February 2012.

The explosion was heard twenty miles away. It killed canal boatmen and wrecked the exotic Pompeian villa of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the fashionable St John's Wood artist. But what caused the 1874 Regent's Park Explosion? Fenian bombs? Sabotage by rival railways or other firms? Or was it something personal?
And whose was the other body found in the canal? An artist's model? The missing King's Cross barmaid? Or another victim of the so-called Thames murderer?
As he struggles to find the answers, Scotland Yard's Sergeant Ernest Best straddles the conflicting worlds of art, wealth and privilege and that of the poverty-stricken canal boatmen in an intriguing mystery that will change his life forever.

'Joan Lock's Dead Image finds new material among the teeming Holmesian possibilities of late-Victorian London ...moves easily between rough-and-ready canal folk and the fashionable London artistic community....a solidly researched crime novel.'The Times

'Dead Accurate'Waterways World

'. . . it is the fascinating background of the canal and narrow boat society that makes this book stand out from the crowd . . . a novel I recommend without reservation.'Sherlock Holmes Magazine

Dead Image large print edition

Dead Image audio edition