Every Good Mystery Needs a Villain

This One Has Been Dead for Eighty Years.

Arthur Carruthers was born in 1890 to one of Bitterport’s most prominent families. His father Percy was the local magistrate, a man of law and order, who had watched his wife die in childbirth. Arthur grew up in the shadow of that punishing grief. He watched his father preside over trials, take bribes that were never officially acknowledged, and learn that justice, in a remote and isolated town, often went to the highest bidder.

He was, in other words, an excellent student.

By the time Arthur reached adulthood, Bitterport’s mining boom had ended and the town was struggling. Where others saw crisis, Arthur saw opportunity. He quietly acquired failing properties. He ran loan sharking operations that targeted desperate families and stripped them of what little they had left. He developed a gambling addiction that required increasingly reckless criminal enterprises to sustain.

He was charming, too. That’s important. The most dangerous people almost always are.

When World War II arrived and munitions contracts made fortunes available to those willing to cut corners, Arthur was perfectly positioned to exploit them. He built a factory. He hired workers. He evaded taxes, smuggled arms, and implemented safety practices so negligent that his own family pleaded with him to change course. He refused.

On June 17, 1943, the factory exploded. Arthur Carruthers died in the blast, along with numerous workers and the last of Bitterport’s hope for recovery.

He never faced a courtroom. He never made restitution. He never, as far as anyone knows, expressed a moment of genuine remorse.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Arthur Carruthers left behind property. A great deal of it. He left behind a web of crimes that had touched nearly every family in Bitterport. And he left behind a legacy that the next generation would carry, and the generation after that.

Some legacies demand to be dismantled.

That dismantling is at the heart of the Bitterport Mysteries. The properties Arthur Carruthers spent his life accumulating are being returned to the families he wronged, the descendants of people he destroyed, and the town he helped to kill is coming back to life.

By whom? That’s a question you’ll have to read the books to answer.

Arthur Carruthers is dead, and has been for eighty years, but the legacy he left behind lives on.

Murder at Millmerran House releases 26 June.

Raven