The rich & largely unseen archive of Country Life dates back to 1897. In Gentlemans Pursuits, the doors are thrown open & a host of fascinating details emerge. Country Life contributed hugely to the cult of country sports in late Victorian/ Edwardian Engl&, & there is an enormous wealth of material from the time, of which a choice selection is presented here. Within this volume are found tips on pipe-smoking for discerning males, advice on gun dogs, rules about how to lay on the best shooting lunches (usually involving long trips to Fortnum & Masons), detailed musings on tweed coats & caps, intense discussions on the correct ammo with which to take on a rogue elephant, & all you ever want to know about fishing tackle. ...

If you were to guess how a womanising, middle-aged brewer was murdered, you might say he was shot by a jealous husband or drowned in his own beer
- not savaged by a horse. The strange death of Charles Berney, savaged & trampled to death by a horse on a windswept stretch of moorl&, came as he had apparently settled down with an attractive young wife & was concentrating on developing his business. He may have argued with his wife at her birthday party the night before his death, but when he set off for a business meeting in London the following morning, no one expected him to end up murdered on the moor. How did he get there? The answer comes only after Gently has unravelled one of the most bizarre cases of his entire career
...

Good music, fine dining & comfortable surroundings
- that's how the Hotel Continental is advertised. Fraud, blackmail, torture
...

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, if you can call having too many suspects a good thing. Gently most wade through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. To George Gently, there is a overwhelming list of people with a reason to hate boat builder & charter fleet owner Harry French. Those with grievances all had a motive but they also had a opportunity to kill him too. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the nerve to smash the victim's skull & dump him in the river. ...

A vintage Bugatti sports car looks graceful & refined from almost any angle
- but not with a corpse behind the steering wheel.
...

The heat is on when a beautiful young woman is found on the beach at the height of summer. Every man in Hiverton knows Rachel Campion. She is the most gorgeous girl to have turned up in the fishing village in living memory. When she is discovered lying dead on the beach, Gently joins the throngs of summer visitors on their annual pilgrimage to the seaside in the midst of a summer heatwave
- & as the temperature soars, the mystery deepens. The long-buried skeleton of a woman is unearthed close to where Rachel's body was found & Gently suddenly has the riddle of two mysterious deaths to solve. Frustratingly, many of the locals, including the secretive brotherhood of fisherman, seem reluctant to talk. Why was Rachel murdered? How is the old skeleton connected with the new crime? Who is the Hiverton Beach Killer?
...

This was no suicide, however it looked
- too many people wanted Adrian Stoll dead. From an embarrassment of suspects, Gently
...

There's blood in the heather & a murderer on the loose when Gently pays a quite visit to the Highlands of Scotl&. Had Brenda Merryn not been such a stong-willed woman & had she not been so much in love with George Gently, driving all the way to Scotland for a holiday with Gently's sister & brother-in-law might have been a bit of a challenge. Spying on a heavily armed private army of nationalists, being held at gunpoint on the hillside, being held prisoner in a filthy outhouse & becoming involved in a murder would be unthinkable. For Gently, it's all in a day's work & his holiday is put on hold while he stalks a murderer in the mountains, with Brenda by his side. ...

Another paperback crime novel by Alan Hunter in the Inspector George Gently mystery series, Gently Sahib sets itself in the little market town of Abbotsham where a tiger has escaped from the local zoo. The question is, what kind of tiger would rip a man to shreds & then bury him in his own back garden? This is the dilemma that Gently Sahib explores. Chief Superintendent Gently has been promoted to C.I.D & is called to London to investigate the discovery of the murdered man. Why has the tiger, which was shot dead a year ago, seemingly hidden one of its victims? Gently can be sure that a tiger did not bury its victim so neatly, but then who did? Gently Sahib showcases more of the investigator's sleuthing as he tries to figure out why someone would want to, or need to, bury the murdered man. Gently Sahib is a great murder mystery for fans of the genre & fans of any previous book in the George Gently series. ...

Gently finds that solving the mystery of the body in the bakery is far from being a piece of cake. When small-time gambler & petty crook Steinie Taylor turns up dead in a hopper of flour at a country bakery, Gently has to figure out not only how he got there, but also why his prime suspects all appear to have dark secrets to hide. Why had the deceased villain & two of his friends been spending money like it was going out of fashion? Where had they acquired the cash? Why had they strayed from their usual haunts? Why did Taylor's friends both disappear? In the kind of town where everyone usually knows everything about their neighbours, there are a few surprises in store for the locals & the investigation becomes ever more sinister when one of Taylor's cronies is also found dead. The race is on to find the third man before the killer can claim him as another victim. ...