​
The Dunston Burnett Trilogy
Immortalised to Death
Fatally Inferior
The Séance of Murder
.png)
The Dunston Burnett Trilogy: Dunston Burnett, a diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper, is hardly detective material, and yet this innocent finds himself involved in seemingly unsolvable mysteries. Fortunately, he has two attributes that may, or may not, aid his sleuthing.
‘Pre-ductions’: Unbidden by him, Dunston’s mind conjures up insights into each investigation. These imagined facts are obviously not hard evidence and they often prove wrong, but when they hit the mark…
​
Tenacity: And he never gives up. Once he has his teeth into something, he has the perseverance of King Bruce’s spider.
The question hanging over each of the three stories, then, is this: Are Dunston’s limited detective skills enough to unravel the fiendishly well executed murders he encounters?
​​
BOOK 1, Immortalised to Death: Dunston believes Charles Dickens’ killer feared some damaging revelation in the unwritten conclusion to the author’s Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dunston figures out the novel’s intended ending, but it takes an unexpected event for Dunston to learn who really took the life of England’s foremost novelist.
BOOK 2, Fatally Inferior: In this story of retribution, Dunston investigates the inexplicable abduction of a member of Charles Darwin’s family from a locked-tight, snowbound country house. Dunston eventually unearths the motive behind the kidnapping, but not in time to prevent a vile act of vengeance.
.png)
BOOK 3, The Séance of Murder: A séance, intended to connect with the victim of a fifty-year-old murder, instead leads to a new murder. By the time Dunston has put the pieces together and leaned the killer’s name, he himself is in jail, accused of the crime he has just solved.
In each story, the reader is kept on tenterhooks wondering whether Dunston’s limited sleuthing talents can possibly be sufficient to solve the seemingly perfectly executed murders confronting him. Expect surprises.