{"product_id":"2026200014356-secondhand-the-bloody-wood","title":"The Bloody Wood","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen a weekend gathering at the English country house of Charne turns sinister, Inspector John Appleby — retired from Scotland Yard but never truly off the clock — finds himself drawn into a web of deception, jealousy, and murder that lurks beneath the cultured veneer of the English upper class. The Bloody Wood is a classic British whodunit in the grand tradition: a sealed world of clever suspects, concealed motives, and a crime that seems almost too artfully arranged to be the work of a mere amateur.\n\nMichael Innes — the pen name of J.I.M. Stewart, a distinguished Oxford don — brings to his fiction the erudition, dry wit, and literary allusiveness that set him apart from his contemporaries in the Golden Age of detective fiction. His prose is laced with irony and a quietly comic sensibility, even as the tension tightens around Appleby's methodical pursuit of the truth. For readers who savour their mysteries with a side of fine writing and intellectual gamesmanship, this novel poses a question as old as ambition itself: in a world of beautiful things and beautiful people, who among them is capable of the ugliest act?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49161024176347,"sku":"2026200014356-SECONDHAND","price":15.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/ee6757e5-64cf-4694-b3a0-807ceda83286.png?v=1787189295","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200014356-secondhand-the-bloody-wood","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}