Stephen Killigan has been cold since the day he came to Cambridge as a junior lecturer. Something about the seven hundred years of history staining the stones of the university has given him a chill he can't shake. When he stumbles across the body of a missing beauty queen, he thinks he's found the reason. But when the police go to retrieve the body and find no trace, Killigan has found a problem - and a killer - that is the very opposite of reason. Killigan's unwitting entry into Jackamore Grass' sinister world will lead him on a trail of tattooists, philosophers, cadavers and scholars of a deadly beauty. As Killigan traces a path between our age and seventeenth century Cambridge, he must work out how a corpse can be found before someone goes missing, and whether he's at the edge of madness or an astonishing discovery. A fast-paced page-turner THE BEAUTY OF MURDER is a speculative crime thriller that travels to the heart of gruesome series of crime by way of a city and a person that have far too many secrets written in blood.
Author
A.K. Benedict read English at Cambridge and Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. She lives in Hastings and writes in a room filled with teapots and the severed head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. She did have a blow-up pirate but punctured it. Alexandra was the front-person of an underground indie band, has composed music for film and television and is currently writing her second novel. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Best British Short Stories 2012. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was published by Orion in 2013.
