“But accidents can still happen… Perhaps there was something out of her control, something she couldn’t have foreseen…”
“Like someone plotting to kill her?”
Reporter sleuth Poppy Denby is asked to investigate the mysterious death of an up-and-coming female scientist in an Oxford laboratory known as the Crystal Crypt.
The official verdict is that Dr June Leighton died in a tragic accident, but Dr Leighton’s lab assistant believes it was murder.
However, when Poppy discovers that the colleague has spent time in a mental institution and has an unresolved murder in her own past, Poppy wonders if she is being misled.
But then, another female academic is attacked, and Poppy herself becomes a target.
The Crystal Crypt by Fiona Veitch Smith is published on 19 November, 2021.
It’s the sixth of her Poppy Denby Investigates novels, Golden Age-style murder mysteries set in the 1920s.
Read Fiona’s feature about how Covid sabotaged her research plans for this book, and how literary heroines came to the rescue in Imagining Somerville: a research mystery.
