World War II. During the attacks on Berlin in the winter of 1943-44, wave after wave of British bombers swept over northern Europe and dropped their lethal loads on the German capital. A fair percentage of the bombers would fail to return from these operations, and RAF planners calculated the life expectancy of the airmen in weeks rather than months.
Therefore it did not seem strange when a Lancaster named D-Daisy landed at its base in England after a bombing run, and a member of the crew was found dead.
However, one person soon came to the conclusion that this man had been murdered. And the person who discovered this happened to be blind since birth. Her name was Daisy and she was the victim’s wife. She was very blonde and very pretty; also very young. Therefore, no one would listen to her. So she was going to have to find the murderer on her own.
“Using the carefully plotted twists and turns of the murder mystery, throwing in a highly unconventional blind sleuth with her very own take on the world, Nick Aaron lifts the genre to a more thoughtful level.” – The Weekly Banner
This 62k novel is the first volume of The Daisy Hayes Trilogy:
I D for Daisy
II Blind Angel of Wrath
III Daisy and Bernard
The Blind Sleuth Mysteries
Daisy Hayes was born in London in 1922. Her father was a bank manager, hoping for a son, but he had to settle for a blind daughter.
Now what do you do when your child is blind since birth and you have the means to do all that is necessary to help her? You hire a private tutor to stimulate her verbal development in the first years of her life, because you realise how vital language will become for her. Then you send her to an exclusive school where everything is done to develop the minds and resourcefulness of blind girls. There they teach them all these fancy techniques of spatial orientation and mind mapping. And before you know it, your darling daughter has developed an exceptional intellect that just seems to draw murder mysteries like a magnet…
First we have a trilogy, which as a whole is a story of crime, punishment, and redemption, and at the same time a portrait of the twentieth century as witnessed by this remarkable blind woman. In volume one Daisy takes us along with her through World War II. The second book brings us to the Swinging Sixties, and finally the third one to 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down.
Then a few stand-alone mysteries follow, that can be read on their own but also fit into the life story of our blind sleuth. “First Spring in Paris” and “Honeymoon in Rio”, for instance, take place in 1946 and 1952, and connect nicely to “D for Daisy”, that ends in 1950. “The Nightlife of the Blind”, on the other hand, takes place in 1984, five years before “Daisy and Bernard”.