Death By Sheer Torture

New York: Dell Publishing, 1988. Two previous Dell editions [stated], First Dell printing [stated] thus. Mass market paperback. Good. 186, [4] pages. Cover has some wear. Signed by the author on the title page. Robert Barnard (23 November 1936 - 19 September 2013) was an English crime writer, critic and lecturer. His first crime novel, A Little Local Murder, was published in 1976. The novel was written while he was a lecturer at University of Tromsø in Norway. He went on to write more than 40 other books and numerous short stories. Barnard said that his favorite crime writer was Agatha Christie. In 1980 he published a critique of her work titled A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. Barnard was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2003 by the Crime Writers Association for a lifetime of achievement. Under the pseudonym Bernard Bastable, Robert Barnard published two standalone novels and two alternate history books starring Wolfgang Mozart as a detective, he having survived to old age. Death by Sheer Torture, also known simply as Sheer Torture, is a mystery novel by English writer Robert Barnard, the first of five novels, penned in the 1980s, featuring his recurring detective character Perry Trethowan. Inspector Perry Trethowan reads in the obituaries that his estranged father has died under peculiar circumstances: he was fooling around with a form of self-torture called strappado. At the request of his supervisor, Peter returns to his ancestral home to determine if any of his cousins or siblings might have helped the old man to his bizarre end. Even more humiliating is the revelation that he was wearing spangled tights at the time, exacerbating Perry's fear that he'll be mocked about this case for the rest of his life. However, any hopes he may have had of fading quietly into the background are halted when his superiors force him to lead the investigation, and so he soon finds himself in search of a killer amongst the eccentric relatives he thought he'd left behind years ago.