Leaving her home, the isolated house on the Yorkshire moors called Starvel, Ruth Averill heads off to stay with a family friend. Little does she know that she will never see it again: the following evening a fire utterly destroys the building, killing her rich and reclusive uncle, along with the two servants. At first this is seen as nothing but a horrible tragedy-a tragedy that's compounded when it's discovered that the vast majority of Ruth's legacy from her uncle was paper money stored in a safe that didn't survive the fire. The safe, however, was reputed for being fireproof, and soon an errant £20 note brings Inspector French onto the scene.
This, the third in the Inspector French series, was inspired by a real blaze that occurred near where Freeman Wills Crofts was living; but the layered drama that unfolds after, and Inspector French's determination to find the next piece of evidence that will uncover the whole mystery, is invention in Crofts' classic style-but with a little help from his wife.
A blaze on the lonely Yorkshire moors leaves three dead and a fortune seemingly destroyed with them, but a single banknote that shouldn't exist is enough to bring Inspector French to Starvel Hollow. As French pulls patiently at the loose threads of an apparently open-and-shut tragedy, a far more calculated crime begins to emerge from the ashes. Rooted in an incident from the author's own life, this tightly plotted entry in the Inspector French series is vintage Crofts: careful, procedural, and quietly gripping.
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