"‘When the body of Alex Ballantyne is found in Barnes Pond the police are baffled. Who could want to kill the newly retired teacher? Investigations bring them to St Jude’s, the prestigious private school where Ballantyne taught, and to the discovery that Ballantyne had been blackmailing several of his colleagues. Sex. Money. Drugs. It seems that Ballantyne knew all about his victims’ secrets, and they were prepared to pay to buy his silence. Is one of the St Jude’s staff the killer? And, if so, which one? DI Moriarty’s on the case and he’s soon discovering that nothing is quite as it seems.’
So runs the blurb of ‘Schooled in Murder’, a crime novel written by Ben Joseph, who is found dead in Barnes Pond the morning after giving a talk as part of the Barnes Book Festival.
DI Garibaldi and his team are shocked to discover that the writer has been killed in exactly the same place, and in exactly the same way, as the victim in ‘Schooled in Murder’.
When they look at the novel they see more connections with real life. Ben Joseph is the pseudonym of Liam Allerton who, like the victim in his novel, is a retired teacher. And he taught at St Mark’s, a school very similar to St Jude’s, the school in his novel.
But is that where the similarities end? How much of Allerton’s own life, and the lives of those he knew, had he put into his novel? And could the clue to the killer’s identity lie in its pages"
"Private tutoring is booming and someones making a killing. An Autumnal Sunday morning, a hungover jogger stumbles across a dead body covered in blood, in Barnes Old Common Cemetery, a long-abandoned Gothic graveyard frequented by druggies and drunkards. The victim has spent the summer working in Italy for the wealthy Rivetti family, who appear have something to hide, as too do his bosses at the high-end Forum Tutorial Agency. And why are his old friends, who he’d been partying with the night before, quite so reticent when questioned? Enter DI Garibaldi, the Met’s only non-driving, country music loving detective. His first step, to unravel the complex workings of the private tuition company, the Forum Agency."
"On the morning after Boat Race Day, a man's body is found in a nature reserve beside the Thames. He has been viciously stabbed, his tongue cut out, and an Oxford college scarf stuffed in his mouth. The body is identified as that of Nick Bellamy, last seen at the charity quiz organised by his Oxford contemporary, the popular newsreader Melissa Matthews. Enter DI Garibaldi, whose first task is to look into Bellamy's contemporaries from Balfour College. In particular, the surprise 'final round' of questions at this year's charity quiz in which guests were invited to guess whether allegations about Melissa Matthews and her Oxford friends are true. These allegations range from plagiarism and shoplifting to sextortion and murder.."
