Dead Letter Box

At ten to five on a Monday morning in November, a milk float is going round the roundabout for the forty-third time. The milkman at the wheel has been dead for hours.

Grimley, 1989. A grim little Midlands town where the Security Service sends officers it would rather forget. Desmond Pike is one of them: scruffy, chain-smoking, haunted by an agent he lost in Berlin, and one bad week away from a carriage clock and a medical retirement.

Then Arthur the milkman is found tied to his steering wheel, with a spy camera on the seat beside him and a coded number inked on every bottle top.

Within days, a fifteen-year-old girl has vanished from the town's richest street. Pensioners are dying quietly in their baths. Someone is breaking into old people's homes and stealing nothing but their photographs. And every thread leads back to a cheerful little tea club that met in a draughty hall in 1953.

Pike's boss wants the case gone before Friday's big inspection. His new partner, Clare Royston, has been told to report on his every mistake. And somewhere in the fog, the clock is ticking down on a girl in the dark who can't remember what nine sevens are.

As the Berlin Wall comes down on every television in the country, Pike has five days to find out who has been running Grimley's spies for thirty-six years, before they finish cleaning up.

Dark, funny and bitterly cold, Dead Letter Box is a classic British crime thriller for fans of gritty detective fiction and old-school spy stories.