The Healers

News of the murder first came to Inspector Stephen Ramsay early on
Monday morning. He was in a meeting, one of the endless meetings the
Chief Superintendent regularly called, and the summons from Sergeant
Gordon Hunter came as a relief.They found middle-aged farmer
Ernie Bowles lying on his kitchen floor. He had been strangled, and was
not a pretty sight. The gruesome discovery of his body had first been
made by the beautiful Lily Jackman, a new-age traveller who was living
with her boyfriend in a caravan on Bowles’s land. Neither of them,
however, had been close to the dead farmer, who had lived alone since
the death of his mother and was, by all accounts, a rather unpleasant
character.Inspector Ramsay fears that this case will not be
simple. In his experience, most murders are straightforward: an
explosion of family pressure, the loss of control in a fight. But Bowles
seems to have kept himself to himself, and Ramsay feels that to solve
the mystery of his death he will need all the help he can get. Then
another person is strangled, a woman who, on the surface, had absolutely
no connection with the dead farmer. Surely two such killings in the
same locality are more than just chilling coincidence.When
Ramsay hears of a third suspicious death, a very tenuous link between
the victims takes on a new importance, for all were connected in some
way to the Alternative Therapy Centre in Mittingford. Could one of the
healers be a killer?