Murder in the Caribbean
‘Deftly entertaining … satisfyingly pushes all the requisite Agatha Christie-style buttons’Barry Forshaw, The IndependentDEATH IN PARADISE is one of BBC One’s most popular series which averages 9 million viewers.DI Richard Poole is hot, bothered and fed up. He’s stuck on the tropical island of Saint-Marie, forced to live in a rickety old shack on a beach, and there isn’t a decent cup of tea to be found anywhere.When a boat explodes in the harbour, Richard and his team soon realise there’s a new murderer on the loose. But who is it? And why did the killer leave behind a ruby at the scene of the crime?As the police dig deeper, they uncover secrets that go back decades, and a crime from the past that can never be forgiven.Worse still, they soon realise this is only the beginning. They’ve got to catch the killer before there's another death in paradise…An original story from the creator and writer of the hit BBC One TV series, Death in Paradise, featuring on-screen favourite detective, DI Richard Poole.
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ROBERT THOROGOOD is the creator of the hit BBC 1 TV series Death in Paradise.
He was born in Colchester, Essex, in 1972. When he was 10 years old, he read his first proper novel â Agatha Christieâs Peril at End House â and heâs been in love with the genre ever since.
He now lives in Marlow in Buckinghamshire with his wife and children.
Also by Robert Thorogood
A Meditation on Murder
The Killing of Polly Carter
Death Knocks Twice
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Robert Thorogood 2018
Robert Thorogood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008238223
Praise for Robert Thorogood
âVery funny and dark with great pace.
I love Robert Thorogoodâs writing.â
Peter James
âThis second Death In Paradise novel is a gem.â
Daily Express
âDeftly entertaining ⦠satisfyingly pushes all the requisite Agatha Christie-style buttons.â
Barry Forshaw, The Independent
âFor fans of Agatha Christie.â
Mail on Sunday
âA treat.â
Radio Times
âThis brilliantly crafted, hugely enjoyable and suitably goosebump-inducing novel is an utter delight from start to finish.â
Heat
âA brilliant whodunnit.â
Woman
For Rosie Evans
Contents
Where do you want me to start? At the beginning? Okay. Then you have to go back twenty years. Thatâs when it all began. With a single gunshot. Nothing before then matters. I was born, I lived my life, but it was in that moment that everything changed. Everything. You canât even begin to imagine what thatâs like. You think you can, but you canât. I used to think the feelings inside me would go away. Somehow. That it wasnât possible to feel like this forever. But guess what? It is. Not that I let on. I got good at hiding it. It used to surprise me, how everyone would look at me and think I was normal. They didnât know about the furnace I had churning inside me. It became like a game. Iâd see how normal I could be. No-one ever knew the truth. And over the years, the decades, that fire inside me changed. It got tighter and denser. And then one day, I realised it wasnât a fire at all. It had become like a diamond. A diamond of pure hate. It made me laugh to feel that power inside me. Knowing that it was what was keeping me sane. And then, finally, the twenty years were up, and I knew I was ready. It was time. Time for revenge.
Ordinary Police Officer Dwayne Myers had lived in the same house his whole adult life. It was a concrete-poured bungalow that was set in lush jungle that rose behind and above the sleepy town of Honoré on the western coast of the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie.
Where the money had come from to buy such a desirable plot of land was, fortunately for Dwayne, never quite established by the Saint-Marie Tax Office. He was also lucky that heâd not had a visit from the islandâs Planning Officer since then because, while heâd started building a two-storey house, his money had run out half way through. This meant that when he took occupancy of his new home, his builders had only completed the ground floor, although theyâd left the necessary steel rods poking up out of the âroofâ should Dwayne ever wish to finish building the floor above.
He never had.
In fact, as the years passed, Dwayne had come to like the way the steel rods jutted out of his bungalow. You always knew which house was his, heâd say proudly to anyone who asked.
But then, the unfinished house was entirely in keeping with the decades-long decline that had gripped Dwayneâs front yard. Where there wasnât dirt, there were rusting motorbike parts, and where there was neither, there were weeds, some of which had grown into fully fledged bushes. And littered around as though dropped by an absent-minded giant was the front end of an old taxi, a trailer on tyres that had lost their rubber years ago, and a wooden speedboat that was rotting into the ground where it lay.
