John Rutherford, bookseller and sometime novelist, discovers the bludgeoned corpse of a policeman one evening while taking a stroll in a rainstorm. The overturned bicycle is what first catches Rutherford’s eye before spotting PC Johnson’s body sprawled on the sodden ground of Phantom Coppice.
When Inspector Charlton is called in to find the murderer, he realises that the perpetrator of this crime may be prepared to go to extreme lengths to cover their tracks . . .
Clifford Witting’s début novel (1937) established him as a highly original master of the genre of what is now known as the Golden Age of Detection Fiction. Galileo has also reissued two of his other works: Catt Out Of The Bag and Measure for Murder.