In the summer of 1989 the Iron Curtain was unraveling, and Daisy Hayes had just become a pensioner who liked to do her ironing while listening to the latest news on the radio.
The doorbell chimed. A police officer handed over a summons—printed in Braille. Daisy was being asked to testify about a baffling and gruesome murder, and had to follow the policeman at once. During the ride to New Scotland Yard, even before the first interview took place, the blind lady reflected that, though she knew nothing about this case, she would not be able to prove her innocence without revealing the two murders she actually had committed—many years ago.
In an original twist to the “good cop-bad cop” routine, the older police investigator in charge of this strange case seemed to be very much in love with the blind suspect, and encouraged her to come clean and find redemption at long last.
“As we have almost come to expect from this author, Nick Aaron playfully tweaks and mixes the conventions of different genres, offering us a compelling murder mystery that is at the same time a heart-rending romance.” – The Weekly Banner
This 53k novel is the third volume of The Daisy Hayes Trilogy:
1. D for Daisy
2. Blind Angel of Wrath
3. 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”.