Garibaldi

On the morning after Boat Race Day, a man's body is found in a nature reserve beside the Thames. He has been viciously stabbed, his tongue cut out, and an Oxford college scarf stuffed in his mouth. The body is identified as that of Nick Bellamy, last seen at the charity quiz organised by his Oxford contemporary, the popular newsreader Melissa Matthews. Enter DI Garibaldi, whose first task is to look into Bellamy's contemporaries from Balfour College.

An Autumnal Sunday morning, a hungover jogger stumbles across a dead body covered in blood, in Barnes Old Common Cemetery, a long-abandoned Gothic graveyard frequented by druggies and drunkards. The victim has spent the summer working in Italy for the wealthy Rivetti family, who appear have something to hide, as too do his bosses at the high-end Forum Tutorial Agency. And why are his old friends, who he'd been partying with the night before, quite so reticent when questioned?

So runs the blurb of ‘Schooled in Murder', a crime novel written by Ben Joseph, who is found dead in Barnes Pond the morning after giving a talk as part of the Barnes Book Festival. DI Garibaldi and his team are shocked to discover that the writer has been killed in exactly the same place, and in exactly the same way, as the victim in ‘Schooled in Murder'.