Hangings at Hempel's Green

In a stranded and fading English village, death is the only thing keeping people alive. A strange ritual foretells a string of murders in this locked-room, closed-village mystery from the author of The Author is Dead. Tradition is important in the village of Hempel’s Green. The villagers do the same things, in the same places, for the same reasons that they always have, and they like it that way. They need it that way. Those traditions are there to stop people from getting killed. Nobody knows what to do when they stop working.

The guardians of one such tradition are being targeted by a killer in their midst. The organising committee are just beginning their work for the year: The chairman and his secretary, the widow and her daughter, the reverend, the shopkeeper, the gossip – and the outsiders. But it’ll take more than a murderer to explain the impossible deaths that follow. Did the victims really die, stand up, and hang themselves by the neck? Did their bodies really walk, sometimes through walls, to the places they were found? Did they really lock themselves in? And if not – who could have done it for them?

A ghost from the past brings a hangman’s rope to a case for too many detectives, in a tale with as many twists as a noose. But the truth is there, in plain sight, if you have the courage to see.