DE GOURLAY PRESS PRESENTS
Peter G Thompson
The Crimson Scarf
London, December 1938
Reginald Hargrove gathers his directors for a Christmas supper. By midnight, one of them is dead, strangled with his own crimson scarf in a house the snow has sealed shut.
The series sets its murders where the real fault lines ran in the years before the war, along the supply chains that fed an anxious empire, from the rigs of Burma to the pipelines of Persia. Beneath the country-house supper and the sealed-room puzzle lie the things the boardroom would rather not see: a contaminated river, a falsified safety report, eleven men dead in a fire, and the woman who will not let their names be forgotten.
Three novels. Each stands alone; together they read richer.
The series
Some debts are paid by other people.
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Crude Shadows
Kent, March 1939
At a secret supper of the men charged with guarding Britain's oil, one of them is poisoned in his chair. The killer is still at the table.
Crude Shadows
The Patient Ground
Kent, March 1939
Occupied France, April 1941
At a secret supper of the men charged with guarding Britain's oil, one of them is poisoned in his chair. The killer is still at the table.
A burned RAF pilot is hidden in a Picardy manoir — in the very house where the enemy officers sent to hunt him are billeted.
Hello, I'm Peter.
Hello, I'm Peter G Thompson, the creator of the Reginald Hargrove Mysteries. After a long career as an oil industry executive in Australia, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and finally a global role at our corporate headquarters in London, I left to build my own company. I am now happily retired, and spend my working days on two projects.
The first is my seventeenth-century manoir on the Somme, in Picardy, which I am slowly renovating while documenting its history. The second is the novels.
The house and the novels have already met. The real Manoir appears in Crude Shadows and becomes the heart of The Patient Ground. The real-life Resistance heroes of Picardy gathered secretly at my home to plan sabotage and to smuggle downed airmen back to England, just as they do in the fiction, and their courage runs through these books.
You can read about the real heroes whose family home, held for over three centuries, inspired this melding of fiction and history on my blog.