Blotto, Twinks and the Bootlegger's Moll - Tapa dura

Due to financial hardships at Tawcester Towers, the Dowager Duchess has decreed that the only way the family fortunes can be restored is to marry Blotto off... to an American!

So begins the fourth adventure in the Blotto and Twinks series, and this time the aristocratic sleuthing siblings end up being transported across the Pond to the gangster-ridden hell-hole that is Prohibition Chicago.

Reluctantly, Blotto, together with Twinks and his trusty chauffeur Corky Froggett set sail on ocean liner S/S His Majesty. He feels like a condemned man as awaiting him in Illinois is fabulously wealthy heiress Mary Chapstick, the only daughter of meat-packing magnate Hiram P. Chapstick III. But it's Twinks who discovers early on that all is not as it seems and that Hiram P. Chapstick III is in fact up to his neck in a bootlegging operation run by the notorious Chicago mobster, Spagsy Chiaparelli.

So Blotto and Twinks set out to unmask the villainy of Hiram P. Chapstick III, where a final shootout takes place among the filthy stockyards, abattoirs and caning factories of Chicago's Meatpacking District - will Blotto and Twinks ever make it back to dear old Blighty?

Born in 1945, Simon Brett was educated at Dulwich College and Wadham College, Oxford, where he gained a First Class Honours degree in English. A great many of his published works are crime novels, including the Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter and Feathering series.

Simon was chairman of the Crime Writers Association from 1986-7 and of the Society of Authors from 1995-7. He lives near Arundel in West Sussex and is married with three grownup children, one grandson, one granddaughter, and four cats.