In Death and Other Obsessions a newly appointed detective sergeant struggles to gain the respect of his colleagues while investigating the suspicious deaths of two authors.
On his first day as a newly appointed detective sergeant with Merton CID, Sanjay Patel is asked to investigate the suspicious death of crime writer Joan Templeton. The main beneficiary of her will is her hard-up niece, Sarah Musgrove, whose husband has the know-how to disable her car. Then Pearl Bailey, a fellow writer who was at Cambridge with Joan Templeton, is killed with a single blow to the head. Are the murders linked? There are a number of suspects: Michael Groves, recently released from prison after serving a sentence for murdering his wife and known to both women. Or Pearl Bailey's lodger and lover, Helena, her disapproving father, Miles Cooke, or maybe even the disgruntled literary agent Anne Gregory...