British & Irish, Action & Adventure, Contemporary, Suspense 

The newspaper cutting said that the skeleton found at the bottom of the pond had probably been there for no more than fifty years. It was the Roman bronze torque on the wrist that seemed to cinch it. The carved altar stones, removed by drainage workmen preparing the site, had to be remnants from Uncle Hector's archaeological digs. Yet there was nothing but a man-trap fastened around the ankle bone. Even so, who else could it be but that loveable old reprobate Darkie Hurrell? To say that the revelation sent James Yeo into a spin would be a gross understatement. Hadn't he spent the best part of his adult life exorcising the illusion that somehow he had been responsible for Darkie's sudden disappearance? Surely his father's plain statement to his mother, that Darkie had done a flit, was the right explanation. It was just not reasonable to expect his donnish mind ot go no entertaining the absurd notion that Darkie had met his end brutishly, due to his own interference. Now, suddenly, this - ! And the whole thing was complicated by that missing trap: if he wasn't after al staring at the culmination of Uncle Hector's raging threats, then who? In a first novel of touching sensibility, John Treherne evokes with uncanny recall the ethos of village life in England in the 1930s. Part detective story, part psychological exploration, The Trap adds a whole new dimension to the trauma of the go-between. It is a virtuoso performance inn high comedy and teasing suspense.