[sufue]

The Singing Sands is the fifth Alan Grant book by Josephine Tey, or the sixth if you count Grant’s appearance as a minor character in The Franchise Affair. It’s on sale for $2.99 in the US right now. Of course, if you are lucky enough to be in one of the countries where copyright laws already put The Singing Sands in the public domain, you can download for free from Faded Page or Project Gutenberg Canada, and probably some other PD websites too.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0868T6YCD
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-singing-sands-19

Spoiler:

On sick leave from Scotland Yard, Inspector Alan Grant is planning a quiet holiday with an old school chum to recover from overwork and mental fatigue. Traveling on the night train to Scotland, however, Grant stumbles upon a dead man and a cryptic poem about “the stones that walk” and “the singing sand,” which send him off on a fascinating search into the verse’s meaning and the identity of the deceased. Grant needs just this sort of casual inquiry to quiet his jangling nerves, despite his doctor’s orders. But what begins as a leisurely pastime eventually turns into a full-blown investigation that leads Grant to discover not only the key to the poem but the truth about a most diabolical murder.