Cousin Once Removed
By Gerald Hammond
Keith Calder returns home from a tour of France with a deep tan, a disenchanted wife, a profitable deal in duty-free and an accumulation of vintage guns – including a pair of duelling pistols found in a bricked-up barn.
He is not long home when it becomes clear that some item in the collection has aroused fierce competition. Not only is he made a tempting but unspecific offer by a titled politician, but an attempt is made on his life and he would have bled to death but for the despatch of an ambulance to his aid, apparently by his assailants.
Not the man to wait on events, Keith sets himself a programme of convalescence and confrontation.
The results, in the best Calder tradition, are devious, shocking and spectacular. They include a humiliating incident on a grouse moor, attempted robbery, a hundred and fifty-year-old duelling scandal and contemporary greed and corruption.
Once again Gerald Hammond has brought expertise, humour and entertainment to a crime novel of high suspense and excitement.
Born in 1926, Gerald Hammond lived in Scotland, where he retired from his profession as an architect in 1982 to pursue his love of shooting and fishing and to write full time. After his first novel, Fred in Situ, was published in 1965, Gerald became a prolific author with over 70 published novels. Most of his novels were published under his own name, but he also wrote under the pseudonyms Arthur Douglas and Dalby Holden.
