When a neighbour from hell comes to a sticky end, a plucky cop refuses to accept the obvious. Miles Kenworth loves to play his rock music at a deafening volume. The other residents of his apartment block are not so keen. One day, after hearing a commotion, Miles’ next-door neighbour discovers his body lying in a pool of blood.
Standing next to the corpse is Jake, the man who lives upstairs. It should be an open and shut case for DS Sunita Roy. But with Jake vehemently protesting his innocence, she decides to dig deeper. Most of the residents wanted Miles shut up for good. But was it really Jake who flipped, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
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An extract from HEIR TO MURDER by Tony Bassett (Chapter One). Exasperated by the loud rock music blaring out from the flat below his, Jake Harris picked up his old cricket bat and raced downstairs to confront his neighbour, Miles Kenworth, who is the rebellious son of a viscount.
Harris felt the noisemaker was having fun at his expense. The man must have heard him knocking. Yet he was steadfastly refusing to open the door. He was happy to let his aggrieved neighbour linger outside in the main foyer of the flats while he continued to indulge in his passion for raucous music.
Well, this could be a day when the music died, thought Harris, as he banged several times more on the door.
'Right,' Harris told himself, 'there's only one thing for it.'
He screamed at the top of his voice,' You've been warned.'
Then he brandished the cricket bat in the air and struck the upper part of the door. Nothing happened. He swung it over his shoulder twice more. The door didn't budge.
So he dropped the bat on the floor, and took a step back from the doorway. Then he kicked hard just to the left of the latch and finally the door flew open.
He had half-expected the rock fan to come dashing helter-skelter towards him through his pale-green hallway, fists flailing and his mouth yelling abuse. But, as the music continued unabated, there was no sign of the occupant.
Harris angrily picked up his bat from the floor and marched into the hall of the modern one-bed flat.
The sound grew louder as he passed the bedroom on the left. He glanced inside it. The dark green curtains were drawn. The bed was unmade. Clothing was scattered on the floor.
Then he proceeded into the living-room. There was no sign of their neighbour. But there, to the side, was the source of all the residents' anguish - Miles Kenworth's sound system.
'Don't say the bastard's gone out and left the music on to torture us,' he muttered to himself.
Without wasting a second, Harris reached down to the nearby plug socket and flicked up the switch. The music stopped at once.
Harris heaved a sigh of relief as blessed silence reigned. Then a smile flickered across his face. Maybe this was his chance to bring an end, once and for all, to the nightly misery which had afflicted them.
He raised his bat again and thrashed about wildly at Kenworth's hi-fi equipment. Within minutes, his neighbour's expensive sound system - including his CD and DVD collection, his CD player, tuner, amplifier and two speakers, were lying in pieces on the oak floor.
Harris stood up. He thought he'd heard something. He looked around the light, airy, open-plan room. He stepped back into the hall and looked inside the bedroom. No, he was alone.
Perhaps it was time for him to go back upstairs. Perhaps the sound had been his girlfriend calling from the first-floor landing.
As he glanced back into the living-room, his eyes rested on a brown jacket strewn across an armchair.
‘Strange I didn’t see that before,’ he told himself. Then, protruding from behind the settee, he saw what appeared to be a black shoe.
Surely the noisy neighbour hadn't fallen asleep on the floor while that cacophony was shaking the building?
His curiosity was aroused now. Still clutching his trusty bat, he ventured across the floor, stepping past a coffee table piled with music magazines and empty beer cans.
Peering behind the settee, all he could do was stare at something lying on a red, patterned rug. And he recoiled in horror.
Tony Bassett is a former Fleet Street journalist. SEAT 97 is his fifth novel to be published by The Book Folks, an independent London publisher specialising in crime fiction.
The previous four books were all part of Tony’s Midlands series which feature Detective Chief Inspector Gavin Roscoe, an experienced detective and family man, and his sergeant, law graduate and resourceful problem-solver Sunita Roy.
The most recent book in this series, Out For Revenge (Book 4), was published in October 2022. It concerns notorious gangland boss Tadeusz Filipowski - a man with numerous enemies who plans to expand his Midlands drug empire on his release from jail.
Among his detractors is a corrupt detective who has in the past helped the drug baron keep one step ahead of the law.
When Filipowski is found dead, it presents DS Sunita Roy from Heart of England Police with a tough case to crack. For so many had a grudge against the dead man that she is overwhelmed by suspects.
She could normally count on the full support of her boss, DCI Gavin Roscoe, in her investigation into the criminal life of Filipowski.
But he has been tasked with an equally crucial investigation – gathering enough evidence against the corrupt detective to bring him to justice.
Eventually, it becomes clear the two inquiries are inextricably linked.
But, as the two detectives pursue events, they realise someone has been plotting a brutal revenge. A revenge that threatens to put the lives of one of the detectives in great peril.
The previous novel, Murder Of A Doctor (Book 3), was released in May 2022. It was the third mystery tale in the series.
This book concerns a well-respected family doctor who sets off on a morning run and is later discovered dead in woods near his home in Warwickshire. Ambitious young detective DS Roy is determined to solve the case.. But the only clues are an expensive necklace and a bus ticket, and there are many suspects..
Murder On Oxford Lane (Book 1) and The Crossbow Stalker (Book 2) were published in the spring of 2022.
Murder On Oxford Lane is about the disappearance of a property tycoon from a sleepy Warwickshire village.
Middle-aged DCI Roscoe and his sergeant, DS Roy, are confronted by suspicious deaths as they struggle to uncover what has happened to the businessman.
The Crossbow Stalker concerns a man being targeted in a hate campaign who begs police for help. Then he is shot dead with a crossbow bolt and a handkerchief embroidered with the letter C found stuffed in his mouth. The detectives face an uphill battle to catch the killer.
Tony is currently working on a fifth book in the Midlands series which concerns a man from a wealthy family found dead in his flat after a row with neighbours over his loud music.
Tony decided to set this string of novels in Warwickshire and Worcestershire after spending many happy years working as a newspaper reporter in Worcester.
He first developed a love of writing at the age of nine when he and a friend produced a magazine called the Globe at their junior school in Sevenoaks, Kent. When he reached his teenage years, growing up in Tunbridge Wells, his local vicar staged one of his plays, about Naboth's Vineyard.
At Hull University, Tony was named student journalist of the year in 1971 in a competition run by Time-Life magazine and went onto become a national newspaper journalist, mainly working for the Sunday People in both its newsroom and investigations department.
His very first book to be published, the crime novel Smile Of The Stowaway, was released in December 2018. It concerns a Kent couple who harbour a stowaway and then battle to clear his name when he is charged with murder.
Then, in March 2020, the spy novel The Lazarus Charter, was released. It involves foreign agents operating in the UK. The book has kindly been endorsed by Marina Litvinenko, widow of the murdered Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, and by Stan and Caroline Sturgess, parents of the innocent mother-of-three poisoned with novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
Tony, who has written several other novels which are as yet unpublished, has five grown-up children. He is a Life Member of the National Union of Journalists. He lives in South-East London with his partner Lin.
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TONY BASSETT WRITES: Thank you so much for posting this extract from HEIR TO MURDER. Best wishes, tony
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