Caroline Graham was born 1931 into a working class family in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and educated at Nuneaton High School for Girls and the Open University. She went on to do an MA in Theatre Studies at Birmingham University.

She has written for radio, television and the theatre but is best known for her series of crime novels featuring Barnaby and Troy, televised as the MIDSOMER MURDERS. The first of these novels, THE KILLINGS AT BADGER'S DRIFT won the McAvity Award for Best First Mystery Novel in 1988 and was also listed in Hatchard's Crime Companion as one of the best 100 crime novels of all time. Her television adaptation of her thriller, DEATH OF A HOLLOW MAN, was runner-up in the Edgars (US) television awards.

When Mallory Lawson’s aunt dies and leaves him her beautiful house in Forbes Abbot it allows him to take early retirement from his appalling teaching job in London and brings his wife the chance to realise her dream of starting her own company. Life will be so much gentler and more straightforward in the country, won’t it?

But Forbes Abbot village, for all its old-fashioned charm, is not quite the close-knit community it appears to be. And on occasion the little differences and squabbles can become downright violent. What causes the most unease throughout the village residents is Dennis Brinkley’s hobby. Everyone agrees that a man should have a hobby to keep him out of mischief and from under his wife’s feet: a nice bit of DIY, gardening, bowls or snooker, mysterious activities in the potting shed. But Brinkley’s is something much more than a hobby. A matter, even, of life and death.

No one – not even the local medium - could possibly have predicted murder. Except, of course, for Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby. He has encountered many intriguing cases in his years on the force, and the case of the ghost in the killing machine is one to test even the most experienced of detectives. With a wonderfully rich cast of characters, Caroline Graham tells an extraordinary and gripping story in what is probably her finest novel to date.