"May, 1588. With Elizabeth I's court rocked by stories of an imminent invasion and one of his key undercover agents missing, Sir Francis Walsingham despatches Kit Marlowe to the Isle of Wight: the first line of defence against the approaching Spanish Armada. Marlowe finds the Islanders a strange and suspicious lot, with their own peculiar customs and dialect. But is there reason to doubt their loyalty to the Crown? And is the Island really haunted, as some believe? Of one thing Marlowe is certain: it's no ghost behind the series of violent and inexplicable deaths which plague the region. But will he have time to expose the killer before the Armada descends?"
"Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling! Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth. Will any of them live to tell Dew's tale? The tale of a rat."
"'And death shall come on soft wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh.' The wings that retired Superintendent Lestrade comes on are those of a de Haviland Hercules. The archaeologist Howard Carter has made the discovery of the century in the Valley of the Kings but all around him, men are dying. Lord Carnarvon, careless with his razor, falls prey to a mosquito bite. Alain Le Clerk leaves the tomb in a hurry to die alone in the desert. Aaron G. String, the railway magnate, blows his brains out yards from the tomb's entrance. And so it is that Sholto Lestrade flies East to solve a riddle every bit as impenetrable as that of the Sphinx."
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