The Body in 22B

A man is dead in his seat. The killer is somewhere on the plane. The doors close in six hours.

Arthur and Beatrice Vane have eleven pounds in their bank account, a business card with a bubbled corner, and the worst case of their short professional lives. Two months ago they walked out of the University of St Andrews to set up as bounty hunters. They have spent the time since recovering a leased Audi from a man in Wisbech, talking a teenager off a ferry, and waiting for their first case that mattered. Their first case that mattered has just arrived.

They are seated in row twenty-five of an eastbound transatlantic flight from Heathrow to JFK when a man called Martin Holt is murdered three rows ahead of them. Holt was a forensic accountant flying to New York to testify against a transnational money laundering network. He has been killed by a contract anaesthetist who paid a student to give up his seat at the gate. The on board doctor has called it a heart attack. The cabin manager has accepted the diagnosis. The killer is sitting six rows from the body, calmly reading a book, and the aircraft is not going to land for another five hours and forty minutes.

Bea Vane, who has spent every minute of her nineteen years cataloguing rooms, knows what she saw. Art Vane, who could talk a confession out of a stone wall, knows what they have to do. They have until JFK to prove a murder no one will believe, identify a man no one can name, protect the only evidence they have, and stay alive in a sealed metal tube at thirty eight thousand feet with a professional killer who has already worked out exactly what kind of trouble they are.

The Body in 22B is the first novel in the Art & Bea series by Tia Holland. A locked-room whodunit at altitude, in the tradition of Agatha Christie, with fair play clues, an unforgettable amateur detective duo, and the closed-circle tension of a Christie classic transposed to a modern airliner.

Perfect for fans of Death in the Clouds, Murder on the Orient Express, Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, Anthony Horowitz, Janice Hallett, Robert Thorogood, and anyone who likes their murder mysteries clever, cosy, British, and impossible to put down once the seatbelt sign comes on.

No graphic violence. No gore. Fair play with the reader. A self-contained mystery with a complete, satisfying ending, and a series that gets better from here.