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Lyn Squire <https://www.lynsquiremysteries.com/> is the debut author of Immortalised to Death (Level Best Books, US, 2023). He was born in Cardiff, South Wales, but is now an American citizen living in Virginia.
He explains that, “During a twenty-five-year career as a development specialist at the World Bank in Washington DC, he published over thirty articles and several books within his area of expertise, including World Development Report, 1990, which introduced the metric – a dollar a day – still used to measure poverty worldwide. Then he turned to fiction.”
His debut novel, Immortalised to Death, “opens with Charles Dickens dead at his desk. Believing the novelist was poisoned to prevent him completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dunston Burnett, a distant relative of Dickens, scours the half-finished manuscript in search of pointers as to how the story might unfold and whom it might threaten. He eventually figures out the intended ending – a chilling, prison-cell confession, and, better yet, recognizes the real-life counterpart behind the villain’s damning portrait.
But has he found the killer? A second murder opens Dunston’s eyes to the real confession in the story – Dickens’s disclosure (as envisaged by Dunston) of his own long-held secret. A series of tenuous clues takes Dunston across London until he finally tracks down the guilty party, or so he believes. But there is one more twist in the tale, and it is not until the very last chapter that Dunston finally learns who really dosed Charles Dickens’s drinking water with strychnine.”
Lyn believes his “novel gives the reader two mysteries for the price of one: an original solution to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, one of the most celebrated unfinished mysteries in literature; and the uncovering of the ‘real’ cause of the great author’s death.”
The adventures of his protagonist, Dunston Burnett, a non-conventional amateur detective, continue in Fatally Inferior and The Séance of Murder, the second and third stories in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy.
Immortalised to Death is scheduled for publication by Level Best Books <https://www.levelbestbooks.us/> on September 26, 2023, and is available for pre-ordering on amazon.com and Bookshop.org <https://uk.bookshop.org>.
