Death of a Hero

An Inspector Jurnet mystery

When a crowd of ten thousand – all men, not a female in sight – assembled on the common land known as Monkenheath in memory of Loy Tanner’s raggle-taggle ‘army’ of 1549, Detective Inspector Ben Jurnet and the aldermen of Angleby were apprehensive. Would the vigil of the sober crowd – no hash, no alcohol – end in the same rape and carnage as that of the bellicose throng of four and a half centuries ago? Was this contemporary phenomenon a disaster waiting to happen?

The tenuous peace of the vast gathering was shattered when Charlie Appleyard, the mob’s Messiah in Levis, spiritual heir to Loy Tanner, was found dead at the house of the town’s nicest nymphomaniac, Jenny Nunn. Not until the untidy rabble was pouring into Angleby, as Tanner’s ‘army’ had done all those centuries ago, did the forces of law and order spring into action.

Death of a Hero is the eighth and last of S. T. Haymon’s Ben Jurnet crime novels.