Hilldown Haven, a posh private care home, offers "luxurious accommodation for discerning seniors," generating expectations of safety, help and respect for its elderly residents. The Doolally Gang turns those expectations upside down and inside out. The Doolally Gang concludes the Odds Bodkins Mysteries trilogy. Set in the gently rolling beauty of South Devon, between the stark granite monoliths of Dartmoor and the undulating coast of the English Channel, these novels explore how honest, hard working and law-abiding people can commit heinous crimes. In Fall of a Sparrow, the first novel in the trilogy, the prohibitive cost of housing and the difficulty young adults have in qualifying for a mortgage bring the villagers of Coombe Gilbert together to develop a plan of good intent that flames out of control, ending in desecration and mutilation. Chapel on the Moor reveals how children in the foster care system endure horrific abuse that culminates in murder and mutilation. The Doolally Gang invites its readers into a lavish care home for seniors, Hilldown Haven, a well-appointed former manor house on extensive grounds. Its residents are both venerable and vulnerable, in a domain that on the surface seems serene and beneficial until its heaving underside of greed and corruption reveals the frightening truth. When 107-year old Philip Sinclair dies unexpectedly, his fellow centenarians in Hilldown Haven plot to avenge his death. Derided by the owner-managers, Conrad and Vanessa Addington, as a bunch of doolallies, they form themselves into the Doolally Gang, committed to killing Conrad first and possibly Vanessa. The Addingtons are highly respected for their Special Patrons of Hilldown Society, a philanthropic endowment plan that enables wealthy residents in the main building to endow lifetime residencies in the smaller, darker coach house wing for homeless seniors. Linking the coach house wing to the rest of the house, is "the good room," where unspeakable horrors occur. Ashley Cort, an intern from the local community college who is completing her first qualification as a carer, discovers while cleaning Philip Sinclair's room after his death that his gold Cartier watch has gone missing. Already distressed by the abusive conditions for seniors she has encountered in the coach house wing, she reports her concerns to her superiors, to no avail. She writes a letter to the editor of the local paper. Within hours of its publication, a note threatening her life is thrust through the mail slot in her cottage door. Shaken, she takes the journal she has been keeping during the six weeks of her internship and gives it to her next-door neighbour, Karen Lawrence, a retired ex-pat Canadian and local author, asking her to take it to the police only in an emergency. Despite her promise, Karen immediately makes an appointment to meet with DCI Bodkin. Bodkin, a fierce and fiery force for justice, is the ginger-haired detective at the core of this series. Almost four years earlier she had transferred to South Devon from Scotland Yard, a perverse career move she never explains. Bodkin and Karen have history. Karen had briefly been her first suspect three years ago in Fall of a Sparrow, primarily because she had discovered the grisly remains of a mutilated body. Then, a year and a half later, Karen was among a group of ramblers who discovered the limb of a missing social worker in the ruins of a remote chapel on Dartmoor. Karen had instantly disliked and mistrusted Cora Bodkin, seeing her as rude and blunt. Over the years, their relationship has very gradually warmed -- a little. Bodkin's investigation uncovers a decade of corruption, fraud, abuse and murder. She struggles within a system where expedited death and assisted suicide are treated the same in criminal law. Ultimately, she makes a decision that she knows will end her career. Criminal psychology blends with a rollicking good narrative to achieve imperfect justice.
About the Author: Sharon Hamilton was born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1944 to parents of English and Metis heritage. She lived in eighteen different foster care homes until she was adopted in 1948. From the first day, her adoptive mother read to her from the Childcraft series of folk and fairy tales, myths and legends, and stories and verse. As soon as Sharon learned to write, her mother encouraged her to write her own story. Those early scraps of paper, typed on her mother's heavy black Underwood, formed the basis for My Name's Not Susie: A Life Transformed by Literacy (Heinemann 1995), Hamilton's first published book. Hamilton began teaching in a one-room eight-grade rural school near St. Adolphe, concluding her public school teaching career eighteen years later as Chair of the English Department at J. H. Bruns Collegiate in Southdale. A scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada enabled Hamilton to study in London, England, where she earned a Ph.D in Language and Literature. After one year as a visiting scholar at the University of Manitoba, Hamilton became a professor of English at Indiana University in Indianapolis, with a focus on rhetoric and composition. A lifelong Anglophile, Hamilton retired to England in 2008 to Torquay in South Devon, birthplace of Agatha Christie, who perfected the genre of the English cozy. Inspired, Hamilton decided to write a series of English cozies, each one grounded in a contemporary social issue. She created Detective Inspector Cora Bodkin, brilliantly intuitive but irascible, blunt and generally unpopular with her male colleagues at Scotland Yard. When Bodkin transfers to South Devon, she soon meets her "Miss Marple" in the form of Karen Lawrence, a retired Canadian English professor. Over time, Karen and her partner, Mary Kemp, serve as what Sherlock Holmes once called his "odds bodkins" and the series came to be known as the Odds Bodkins Mysteries. Hamilton now resides in Winnipeg, Canada.