London, 1914. Called out to investigate the murder of an employee of the House of Brackley, an upmarket Kensington department store, Detective Inspector Silas Quinn finds himself investigating one of the most bizarre cases of his career. For the chief murder suspect is a monkey.
One of the store’s fashion models has been found dead on her bed, strangled with a red silk scarf. The room is locked from the inside, the only other occupant being a monkey in a red fez hat.
While he is sceptical of the theory that the monkey is the killer, Quinn suspects it holds the key to the mystery.
But where has it disappeared to? And how will he ever get to the truth when faced with the maelstrom of resentment and thwarted passion that is the mannequin house?
The Mannequin House by RN Morris, the second in his Silas Quinn mystery series, is reissued in paperback on 26 August.
See more about the first book in the series, Summon Up the Blood.
RN Morris writes about a bizarre historical collaboration in Did radicals and reactionaries unite against Tsar Alexander II?
And in Walter Raleigh: stripping away the cloak of myth he finds a way to reinterpret the stories everyone knows but which might never have happened.
