Winding Up the Serpent (Joanna Piercy # 1)

Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy breaks into the house of missing nurse Marilyn Smith. She finds Marilyn upstairs, spreadeagled across the bed, provacatively dressed and elaborately made up – she is also stone dead.

Despite a lack of evidence at the post mortem, Piercy is convinced that Marilyn was murdered. As a newcomer and a woman in this remote moorland town, she must battle against long-held prejudices in her determination to find the killer. But could she be wrong? Is it possible that Marilyn Smith’s death was not murder after all …?

‘It’s Masters’ first novel and a cracking start to her career in literary crime’ – Daily Express 

The first in Telos Publishing’s reissues of noted British crime author Priscilla Masters’ Joanna Piercy mystery series

243pp. B-format reissue novel.
ISBN 978-1-84583-881-2
Published 22 April 2014

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Priscilla Masters was born in 1952 in Halifax, Yorkshire and adopted at six weeks old by an orthopaedic surgeon and his Classics graduate wife – number three of seven multi-racial adopted children!  She moved to Birmingham at the age of 16, and qualified as a registered nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in 1973.

A lifelong fan of crime novels, she began writing in the mid 1980s in response to a challenge made by an aunt asking her what she intended doing with the rest of her life. She borrowed a typewriter the next day. In 1994 the first of her DI Joanna Piercy novels, Winding up the Serpent, was published by Pan Macmillan. She has now written 11 Joanna Piercy novels in total and is currently working on the twelfth. She has also written five novels set in Shropshire featuring Shrewsbury Coroner Martha Gunn, and a number of medical stand-alones dealing with such issues as the blurred line between sanity and insanity, the arrogance of a surgeon and the difficulties face by a female GP.

She is married to a doctor, now retired and running a successful antiques business in Leek, Staffordshire, which is where her Joanna Piercy novels are set. They have two sons and two grandsons.