The Demon of Dartmoor

A famous actor is sent to his death from a high window; eye witnesses say he was pushed by an invisible hand, thus mimicking another murder committed in the same house more than fifty years earlier. Three local girls have also died in similar inexplicable fashion, propelled from the top of Wish Tor, a rocky outcrop. Is there an invisible creature roaming the sinister and forbidding landscape of Dartmoor? Or is there a human agency behind the murders and, if so, how is it done? The renowned criminologist Dr. Twist and the irascible Inspector Hurst of Scotland Yard are sent to investigate.

The Demon of Dartmoor is the fourth Paul Halter novel to be published in English, and the second featuring Twist and Hurst. In the BBC Radio 4 program ‘Miles Jupp in a Locked Room,’ broadcast on May 21, 2012, it was hailed as one of the most ingenious solutions ever written, and totally original. It has a plot line that writhes like a snake.The author, best-selling French writer Paul Halter, has written over thirty novels, almost all ‘locked room’ or ‘impossible crime,’ and is widely regarded as the successor to John Dickson Carr. His prize-winning novel The  Fourth Door, also featuring Dr. Twist, was published on Amazon in 2011.

The two novels featuring the dilettante Owen Burns’ The Lord of Misrule and The Seven Wonders of Crime were published in 2010 and 2011 respectively. A fifth Halter novel The Invisible Circle, is planned for late 2012. Locked Room International also published The Riddle of Monte Verita in 2012 (“wonderfully captures and evokes the glory days of the detective story”,) and plans to publish Henri Cauvin’s ‘The Killing Needle,’ featuring the French precursor to Sherlock Holmes, also in 2012. For more information, contact pugmire1@yahoo.com