I didn’t like this creature (and it got a lot of space in the book) and I didn’t like its master, this wealthy man who was quite a despicable individual and yet nobody is said or done about it, and at the end he will only get like six months of prison for ‘concealment of his death’ after he killed a servant some time before our story, he said in self-defence, but of course he would say that. The fact that he used to raid Borneo and kidnap women as he liked doesn’t seem at all important… well at least he got one away, for sure.
Furthermore, one thing that made no sense was that the murderer was to be found just where our hero was, by coincidence, since he was there simply to follow a weak trail in the investigation.
The story, in as many details as I can with my memory and without being boring:
Michael Brixan investigates the case of the head-hunter, a serial killer who leaves heads to be found. Twelve heads in seven years. The latest victim was Francis Elmer, and he was Adele Leamington’s uncle. She was the last person to see him alive, although he did not see her, and so Michael is sent to Chichester to meet her.
He falls in love with her basically at first sight.
She’s working a an extra in a film, but dreams of doing more, and she gets her chance when the spoiled leading actress Stella Mendoza argues with the director once too much and is fired. This is when Michael gets his first important clue, he finds a page written with the same typewriter that wrote all the head-hunter messages, so he sticks around to learn more. Mr Lawley Foss who receives all the manuscripts sent by people, says he knows nothing of who wrote that particular page, but later on in the book he will get killed by the head-hunter, I guess he tried to blackmail him for money.
Jack Knebworth is the director, and is maybe the nicest character all round, he and Adele.
They shoot some of the film scenes on two location with the permission of their owners, Sir Gregory Penne and old Mr Longvale.
Adele is totally repulsed by Sir Gregory, and with good reasons, she has a good head. He tries to befriend Michael when he thinks he’s just an extra and friend of Adele, hoping that Michael will bring her to him. He shows Michael his collection of old, very sharp swords, his servants from Borneo and his most loyal servant Bhag. He is a very unpleasant man.
One day Jack sees in his pictures that there’s a woman in that house, with a terrified face. Sir Gregory ask Longvale’s help since he has medical experience (not much, but Sir cared more about privacy than about the woman. Sir said the woman was sick, I don’t know the truth about that, only that the new stranger in town came to get her because she was his wife who Sir Gregory took away. They fight for her, and then the woman leaves with the stranger and Longvale finds them and helps them.
Stella is quite angry at being replaced so easily, and starts creating trouble, at first by trying to scare Adele away, but she’s not stupid. Then she tries with Jack, but he’s fed up with her and he likes how Adele works, so Stella goes to Sir Gregory, who was once very infatuated with her and gave her money and help. She wants, almost demands his money to fund her own company, but he’s tired of her. She tries blackmailing him because she knows that he once killed a servant, he says it was self-defence, but he did kill him and most of all he did hide his body. At the end, she’ll go to his house one last time, thinking he changed his mind, but he didn’t. He got very drunk, he kept her driver with his servants, and locked her in a room, then took her car and went to get Adele with a ruse. Not listening to her protests, he took her home and in the room with Stella for a while. Stella gave her her own mini-gun to defend herself, unwilling to leave an innocent girl in Sir Gregory’s filthy hands. Adele managed to get away from him and run, only to be followed by Bhag. Adele shot him too and kept escaping, until she fell down into a hidden cave…
Michael and Jack are alerted when Adele’s landlady shows up to bring them something she ‘forgot when she came to see them’, only she never came to see them that night, so they learn of her abduction. Michael is afraid for her, and he can’t find either her or Sir Gregory. He finds Stella only. He runs after them, and then he goes where he thinks Sir Gregory is, and where he thinks he’ll find the head-hunter. It’s Mr Longvale. The ancestor he was so proud of, who we never got to know who it was until now, was apparently the man that used to cu heads in France, he manned the guillotine, and even took the king and queen’s heads. Now he wants to follow in his footsteps, and is perfectly convinced of his mission and purpose. He got Sir Gregory down his house, and he gets Michael too, embarassingly easy.
He wants to cut their heads, then Adele shows up to stop him, walking through the cave to under his house, but after such an adventure the little gun is too full of dirt to function properly, so Longvale gets her too. He can’t do anything against Bhag though, who very much resents his treatment of Sir Gregory, so Longvale is the one to lose his head. Bhag put him in the guillotine.
At the end, Jack complains that she will not go fara in the film industry because she’ll get married and leave work behind…
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