The Skeleton Man

The Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry is a lonely, forgotten spot. Requisitioned decades earlier by the Ministry of Defence for military training, one of its few claims to fame is that in its entire thousand-year history,

it never recorded a single crime.

But when a Territorial Army exercise is held amongst the ruins, a skeleton is found hanging in a bricked-up cellar, a noose round the neck. It seems that the ghostly village may hide many secrets and local newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is soon on the case.

Then a man, pulled unconscious from the river at nearby Ely, claims to have lost his memory, yet reacts with startled fear to the name Jude's Ferry ...



Jim Kelly was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective. He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the

Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and the

Financial Times. His first book,

The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.