Returning home from one of her investigations, Harriet encounters 'Bungo', Peter's old school friend and now a high-ranking officer in British Intelligence, who has received a coded message from Peter which Peter had said only she could decipher. Glumly, she reflects that her list of possible suspects has been reduced to a random 'wandering maniac'. She also establishes that everyone in the shelters is accounted for, and that there was no way for anyone to leave either shelter unnoticed during the drill. Patient investigation leads Harriet to eliminate several potential suspects, including two young men in the village with whom Wendy flirted and the RAF pilot who was last with her on the night she died. She was killed in the village street while most people were in the village's two air raid shelters during the drill, and much of the investigation turns on who had been, or could have been, outside the shelters when the murder was committed. The murdered girl, Wendy Percival, had come from the city as a Land Girl, to do agricultural work and help the war effort.

Peter and Bunter are away on an undercover assignment.ĭuring an ARP drill, a young woman is murdered in the village, and Superintendent Kirk (who last appeared in Busman's Honeymoon) recruits Harriet to help solve the murder, as the police are short-staffed due to the war and Harriet, as a crime novelist and the wife of a detective, is felt to be the best-qualified available person to find the murderer. Harriet (Lady Peter Wimsey) has evacuated her family to the Wimseys' country house, Talboys in Hertfordshire, taking her two children, along with the three children of her sister-in-law, Lady Mary, and Peter's venerable old housekeeper, Mrs Trapp. A Presumption of Death is written by Walsh, except for excerpts from The Wimsey Papers. The novel is Walsh's first original Lord Peter Wimsey novel, following Thrones, Dominations, which Sayers left as an unfinished manuscript, and was completed by Walsh. A Presumption of Death is a 2002 Lord Peter Wimsey– Harriet Vane mystery novel by Jill Paton Walsh, based loosely on The Wimsey Papers by Dorothy L.

First peter wimsey novel