Three victims, each murdered twice, appear in disparate parts of England.
After James Markham jilts his fiancée and marries Abigail, a woman he’s known barely a week, the bride dies cutting down mistletoe. Callum Firbank loses his neighbor’s son at a motorcycle rally, then dies in a car park several months later. Jill Irving, helping her third husband run a B&B, dies alone in a lovers’ trysting place. The trio, widely separated geographically, have only a few things in common. All of them received picture postcards of the Lake District with no message on them, and all of them had their throats slashed and were then strung up and hanged. Tracking their nemesis is complicated by the fact that all the victims were exceedingly close-mouthed about their pasts. The tale has run half its course when the avenger pops around to describe a tragedy that befell his family over 20 years ago and lays the blame on Abigail, Callum and Jill. More deaths and a major plot twist will follow apace before all the facts are in and the story careens to an even more tragic conclusion.
Creepy and unsettling, although that final twist is a bit over the top for Fraser (Next Door to Murder, 2008, etc.), who’s usually more circumspect.
