Skulduggery

📖 The Scoop

“An inspired poet of the bizarre” – New York Times Book Review

Out of the mist-enshrouded sea a wooden raft drifts slowly into shore on Hong Bay beach. It carries no sail or rudder, just a selection of miscellaneous objects: a man’s skeleton with its ankles roped together, a dead fish, a mound of sweet potatoes, a set of false teeth and a ten-inch length of blue galvanised iron drainpipe.

The morgue give their verdict: murder, committed twenty years before.

Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer of the Yellowthread Street police station is called in to investigate. The false teeth quickly identify the victim. But who killed him, buried him, and then dug him up again twenty years later only to set him adrift on a raft?

Another intriguing, action-packed mystery starring the boys from Yellowthread Street.

“Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World

“Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly

“Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune

“Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press

“Marshall’s novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure.” TIME

“Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews

“Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times

Genre: Fiction / Thrillers / Crime (fancy, right?)