Willoughby Sharp

Murder in Bermuda Willoughby Sharp

While placidly pedaling his bicycle on the morning before Easter, Constable Simmons, a twenty-year veteran of the Bermuda Police Force, discovers a beautiful woman's lifeless body on Snake Road. She has been stabbed to death. Incongruously, a bouquet of lilies lies by her side. From this slender clue of the Easter lilies an intricately interlaced murder problem quickly blossoms in Bermuda. Soon another person, a man this time, is found dead in Hamilton, the territorial capital. He has been struck down by mercury bichloride. Can the intrepid Bermuda Police Force send Death, a most unwelcome visitor, packing, before a third victim is found? A pioneering police procedural crime novel, Willoughby Sharp's Murder in Bermuda focuses not on the investigative activities of a solitary super-detective, but rather on those of several ordinary policemen. The author, who at the time he wrote the novel lived with his family in Bermuda, also presents his readers with appealing local color and a tricky, fair play problem that is in the best tradition of Golden Age detective fiction. Originally published in 1933, Murder in Bermuda provides readers with, as a contemporary reviewer stated, "as complicated and satisfying a mystery as one could hope to find."