Amy Myers is known for her short stories and historical novels featuring Victorian chef Auguste Didier and chimney sweep Tom Wasp. Her contemporary series feature ex-cop Peter Marsh and Daughter and classic car detective Jack Colby, and she is currently working on a new series starring Cara Shelley who runs a café in the grounds of stately home Tanton Towers.
Website: www.amymyers.net
Head Count is the second in Judith Cutler’s new series starring head teacher Jane Cowan, and with this redoubtable and charismatic protagonist there’ll be many more of her cases to come.
The school is Wrayford on the Kentish south coast, but in Head Count Jane has accepted responsibility for a second school nearby, Wrayford Episcopi. It is the beginning of the school holidays, but it is to be no holiday for Jane, much as she had hoped to devote time to her other passion in life, cricket. First, she is struck by a virus; next while bicycling along a lane she is deliberately run off the road by a car that does not stop. Rescued by a middle-aged couple, she sends flowers in thanks to them. But the flowers remain on the couple’s doorstep and it proves impossible to contact either the man or his wife.
Then problems begin to accumulate at the school, as well as in Jane’s private life, and although seemingly unrelated she begins to realise she is being personally targeted. Why, she had no idea, but her determination to find out leads her to the heart of a tragedy.
The author subtly twists seemingly unrelated incidents into a web that plunges the plot into the raw problems of immigrant trafficking, as well as providing a pacey story with the engaging Jane Cowan. May her career be a long one!
