Dr Ruth Dudley Edwards was born and brought up in Dublin, Ireland. Since she graduated she has lived in England, where she has been a teacher, a Cambridge postgraduate student, a marketing executive, a civil servant and, finally, a freelance writer, journalist and broadcaster. An historian and prize-winning biographer, her recent non-fiction includes the authorized history of The Economist, a portrait of the British Foreign Office and a book about the newspaper world of the mid-twentieth century. She uses her knowledge of the British establishment in her satirical crime novels- targets so far include the civil service, gentlemen's clubs, Cambridge colleges, the House of Lords, the Church of England, publishing, literary prizes and - always - political correctness. She has three times been short-listed for awards from the Crime Writers' Association.
"English crime at its most understated...Despite a corunucopia of corpses, the author's cool appraisal of the subtleties of the civil service mind is delightful. The juxtaposition of a superintendent used to a different type of criminal mind and that of a civil servant, whose sense of the ridiculous helps the elegant untangling of apparently intractable clues, is the key to the book's success." --Lisanne Radice, The London Times "Cleverly constructed and lightly written, this novel shows that, in the age of postmodernism and metaphysical detection, the unembellished story can still hold its own." --Patricia Craig, Books and Bookmen"Edwards's brilliant mix of farce and mystery...The author delivers a jolt with each development in the case and the final one is a thunderclap." --Publishers Weekly "A witty and elegant tale of wrongdoing in Whitehall, where our rulers stab each other in the back, both literally and metaphorically...a splendid murder story." --Keith Jeffery, Times Literary Supplement "A rather offbeat novel about murders in the higher echelons of the British civil service...The plotting and writing are good, and - just as important - the unflattering look at the workings of the British bureaucracy is convincing." --New York Times - in 'Notable Books of the Year' 1982 "As funny as Yes Minister, if rather more savage." --Tribune "An honest, witty, sometimes jaundiced and occasionally malicious view of that great British institution, the civil service." --The Economist "A pleasantly talky, old-fashioned whodunit - with informative satire of politician-vs-civil-servant tangles in Whitehall bureaucracy." --Kirkus Reviews
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