The Last Train to Brackley Central

Done has returned to his home ground with his latest Insp Charles Vignoles mystery, set in the Northamptonshire town where he grew up.

The old Brackley railway viaduct, demolished some years ago, plays an important role in the story.

It begins in the Egypt of 1882 when a wealthy woman has been given a huge diamond ring, known as the Cobra’s Eye, by her husband, who is killed in a British naval bombardment on Alexandria.

The ring slips from her clothes as she travels by camel near El Alamein and is found by Second World War soldier Raymond Coulson. He gives the ring to his fiancee, Betty, while on leave in Brackley, but he too is killed in the war.

Betty meets US airmen at dances and finds herself pregnant. She seeks out a doctor for an illegal abortion. The doctor spies the Cobra’s Eye and tricks it out of Betty. She attacks him, but in the struggle she falls on a hard surface and dies.

Richard Irons, a new teacher at Magdalen College School, Brackley, in 1950, is persuaded to recover the ring by a woman travelling one night on the last train out of London Marylebone to Brackley Central.

His burglary goes wrong and Irons is savaged to death by a dog.

Enter Insp Vignoles and his sidekick Det Sgt John Trinder, of the detective department of the police of the Great Central Railway, which ran from Marylebone to Brackley, Banbury and points north before being axed by Beeching. Naturally they are baffled.

Once again Done has delivered a cracking tale with plenty of period detail, not least of the steam railway era; though it is necessary to believe in ghosts.

He originally planned five Insp Vignoles stories and this is the fifth. The good news is that a sixth is due out next year.